Hallucinatory horror in the woods ultimately turns into a bit of a slog
Bad things happen in the woods – just ask Little Red Riding Hood. In Robert Alan Evans’s new play we appear to be somewhere in backwoods America, if only on the evidence of the rural twang deployed by a bedraggled Lesley Sharp, who paces up and down through the trees of Naomi Dawson’s marvellous set like a spectral old woman from a fairy tale. But as Lucy Morrison’s immersive production soon makes clear, these woods are instead an imagined place, summoned from the turmoil of a disintegrating mind.
Boldly eschewing almost any resemblance to naturalism, Evans uses a sequence of discordant scenes to build a partial portrait of mental collapse. Sharp’s Woman, with tangled hair and ragged dress, has found a wounded boy in the snow and is tending to him in a collapsing shack in the woods. Outside a Wolf in a yellow tracksuit prowls. He calls her mama but also terrorises her, and demands she hand over the boy. Various items lie discarded among the trees – a birthday balloon, a baby’s cardigan.
It’s clear something appalling has happened – and it doesn’t take much on the part of the audience to work out what. A recurring early scene set inside a brightly lit modern kitchen, featuring the Woman and the piercing cry of a baby, establishes a somewhat inevitable sense of horror. After this the play shifts location – to the side of an American Interstate, a children’s playground in England, a psychiatrist’s office. The Wolf (played with nasty, quicksilver charm by Tom Mothersdale) is always there, each time in different clothing, each time providing the Woman with a taunting reminder of what she has lost.
Morrison’s production is initially thrilling: it begins with a series of lightening bolt tableaux against a backdrop of darkness and sonic turbulence. Yet it also makes the play feel more powerful than it actually is. Evans’s oblique, hallucinatory exchanges dramatically never pay off. Sharp is excellent in her raddled anguish but her performance can’t break through the writing’s persistent fog. It is, I’m afraid, a bit of a slog.
Until Oct 20. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com