Dystopian drama struck by curse of Westeros
Foxfinder Ambassadors, WC2 ★★★★★
The Mousetrap has a new neighbour – and one with almost as intriguing a title. What’s a foxfinder? Dawn King’s mysterious dystopian drama – which premiered on the fringe in 2011 – imagines England under martial law. Those who cross the authorities can be sent to “factories”, while a focus of the totalitarian state’s concern skulks, seldom seen, in the wild – the immediate culprit for any dip in agricultural output. Woe-betide any farmer suspected of allowing a fox to roam about unchecked – a dreaded “foxfinder” will be sent along to investigate.
King’s play – being developed into a film – must presumably, in its first incarnation, have achieved plausibility despite its far-fetched trappings and loaded symbolism. Yet no such vital sense of things fundamentally mattering is forthcoming in Rachel O’riordan’s stilted revival, which offers as its prime audience bait Game of Thrones star Iwan Rheon.
The latter plays William Bloor, the zealous official who comes to assess the struggling farm run by Judith and Samuel Covey, who are coping with the loss of a child and physical estrangement. Rheon’s gift for communicating glinting malevolence as the villainous Ramsay Bolton in Game of Thrones is barely apparent here. The young interloper (the boyish 33-year-old Welsh actor just about passes for 19) is constrained by an attitude of insistent rectitude, his delivery quietly understated to the point of monotony.
Like the puritanical Angelo in Measure for Measure, this model of repression, much given to selfflagellation, finds his wild side subject to temptation as his stay continues. His vulnerable hostess (played with similar drab restraint by Icelandic actress and Poldark star Heida Reed) is his prey – the lapse of lust ushering in an ideological disturbance that’s manipulated into a madness. The shift in power is interesting but too little upheaval registers in Rheon’s performance.
Hard of stare and wobbly of rustic accent, Paul Nicholls plays the benighted farmer, with Bryony Hannah a passing flurry of vivacity as a neighbour. Gary Mccann’s set looms trees over an austere kitchen, but shuts out useful naturalism (there’s a staircase but no upstairs).
After Kit Harington’s dull Doctor Faustus and Richard Madden, so wooden in Romeo and Juliet, has the “curse” of Game of Thrones struck again? Perhaps projects that try to exploit the lucrative magic of Westeros in the West End should be culled from now on. Avoid. DC