The title sounds like the start of a joke, but there is nothing funny about this latest piece from writer Lulu Raczka and director Ali Pidsley, who worked on Barrel Organ’s Nothing and Some People Talk About Violence. As in those two fine shows, the threat of violence creeps across the stage, aided by Kieran Lucas’ nervy sound design and Peter Small’s lighting, which often plunges the audience into a disorienting darkness so deep and shroud-like it feels as if the show has slithered off the stage and into the auditorium, where it proceeds to worm its way inside your head.
It’s good to have these young theatre-makers experimenting with the possibilities of darkness. Particularly in a week in which BAC is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its groundbreaking Playing in the Dark season, which so resoundingly refuted the notion that theatre where the audience can’t see is nothing but radio drama.
On the contrary, here Pidsley and Raczka use darkness like a third character as schoolgirl Steph (Laura Woodward) enlists the help of bartender Bell (Bryony Davies) in finding her friend Charlotte who has disappeared. But nothing is certain, least of all truth, in this dystopian city where violence lurks in the shadows and where, in the regular terrifying blackouts, women go missing.
There are shades of Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp in the writing, which forces the audience to turn detective not just to track down the elusive Charlotte but also to find meaning itself. We experience the blackouts, but, with its flashes of strip lighting, Pidsley’s production also suggests the firing of synapses, memory loss and the way in which the mind sometimes tries to shut out trauma.
What’s not in doubt is a real sense of fear and the play’s deeply moral heart, which suggests that even in times when the truth is slippery, it is well worth searching out.
• At New Diorama, London, until 17 February. Box office: 020-7383 9034. www.newdiorama.com
