Plot-twists aplenty in this powerful drama
Leopards
Rose Theatre, Kingston
★★★★★
Something that has slightly flown out of the window since theatre made its comeback is the unabashed desire to welcome and entertain people. Too many venues are viewing the Covid protocols as an invitation to treat their audiences like recalcitrant plague-carriers, and artistic directors seem to be inclining towards medicinal, worthy fare.
The sector needs to lighten up, which doesn’t necessarily mean succumbing to froth and nonsense. It’s a relief to return to the Rose, Kingston (still operating with social distancing), after aeons away, to find that the man in charge – Christopher Haydon – is directing a piece that grips and thrills, while grappling with gritty issues.
Leopards is an awkward beast to review, because it’s spotted with plot-twists that reveal what’s at stake dramatically.
What I can say straight away is that however much it inclines at times to farce-like contrivance, that’s amply compensated for by emerging Welsh writer Alys Metcalf ’s gift for pacing and combined grasp of power-play and topical pertinence.
The two-hander scenario has the same neat simplicity and potential for conversational conflict as David Mamet’s Oleanna. A mixed-race woman in her twenties has managed to coax the white, middle-aged married head of a leading environmentalist charity to meet in a London hotel.
Ostensibly it’s a cheeky networking exercise, designed to pick his brains and curry his favour as she mulls a career-switch. It requires gentlemanly niceness on his part to suffer her familiar attitude – plying him with champagne, she blurs the line between informal enthusiasm and predatory intent. But as the evening wears on that ostensible “goodness” gets interrogated at close quarters, the pair heading for a bedroom and (this spoiler feels necessary) a mooted bondage session.
The piece carries a whiff of the allegorical-satirical; there’s a storm blowing as if Gaia herself was in a rage. But it’s drolly done, not didactic. The dialogue loads off-hand remarks (“our collective memory is short,” he muses) with irony, but lets us put things together.
The actors bring subtlety too, while allowing this play of ideas its melodramatic flourishes.
Saffron Coomber’s Niala sports sly looks, calculating glances and a teasing air of vengeful derangement. Martin Marquez’s Ben migrates from kindly-lordly mansplainer to rattled underdog. More than this, I won’t add except that, as the debate about climate change hots up, it’s heartening to see a writer zero in on how tackling the fall-out from our species’ misdeeds may require facing up to failings closer to home.