In Orwell's 1984 Winston Smith struggles to find a blind spot to conduct his rebellion out of sight of Big Brother's all-seeing eye. Rob Evans's edgy drama, which takes place in the wake of a child abduction, is set in the here and now but it gives the sense of a world where we spend our time observing each other through the lens, where our image and sense of self and each other is filtered through the grainy pictures that seem more real than real life.
On the many CCTVs dotted around the theatre, the image of a little girl making her way home from school, being stopped by a man and trustingly slipping her hand into his as he leads her to a car, is repeated again and again. It is the betrayal of that little hand that cuts you.
Directed very niftily by Joe Hill-Gibbins in the round, with much of the audience surrounding the action so you can never get away from it, Evans's play depicts a world of intense loneliness through the fragmentary stories of several lost souls stranded in the dark and the pelting rain. It is a world where despite all the cameras, a child can simply disappear; where the memory of the person you loved fades, where a woman on the shopping channel talks into a camera in an empty studio, where a gay narcissus is so busy watching the effect he has on others that he forgets to feel.
There is much about Evans's narrative, and its interweaving of the stories of those who have claimed ownership of the child's tragedy, that is reminiscent of Simon Stephens's One Minute. But there is an imaginative verve and quiet intensity about Evans's writing that is wholly original and which keeps you with it even when the drama is at its most elusive.
