Nick Blood and Amaka Okafor
(Picture: The Other Richard)Written in 2005, Dennis Kelly’s remorseless, compact nightmare of a play feels oddly prescient. A study of how quickly humans revert to base urges, it’s also the ultimate lockdown drama. Lyndsey Turner’s taut production is well acted and unfolds with a grim inevitability, but there were times I wished I was at Anything Goes or Six the Musical.
It begins when Louise (Amaka Okofor) wakes up in a nuclear bunker where she’s been carried unconscious by nerdy work colleague Mark (Nick Blood). He tells her everything outside has been turned to ash, but they’ve got enough food and water for two weeks if she follows his careful rules. Her first thought is for the new job she was due to start on Monday; her second is of her brother, now presumed dead.
What follows is a study of shifting power and of human relationships stripped back to the bone. Initially the two characters are almost in equilibrium. Mark is clearly attracted to her in an incel kind of way but she is armoured by confidence and popularity, carried over from the outside world. He controls the only real currency underground, though: food, heat, a radio, a knife.
In between reminding her of past slights and attempting to persuade her to play Dungeons and Dragons (to keep her mind occupied, he insists), they have a discussion on geopolitics. He tells her: “If you have power you should use it”. It’s only a matter of time before somebody does.
Kelly is too deft a writer to make the dynamic entirely one-sided. Beyond the surface struggle, he’s interested in what happens when patterns of behaviour are broken down, on both sides. The dialogue is halting, overlapping and well observed. Just as you think it’s over, Kelly turns the tables with a surprise fourth act.
But it is discomfiting how easily the script trades in the tropes of the “captured woman” scenario we’ve seen in countless crime dramas. And if this play has a model, it’s John Fowles’s creepy novel The Collector, only here the scenario is more far-fetched. Let’s face it, it is a little bit convenient that Mark happens to own a flat with an intact 1980s bunker in the garden, isn’t it? And I don’t think anyone ever thought a nuclear winter would end after two weeks.
Designer Peter McKintosh gives us an underground cell that’s bilious yellow, the escape hatch set unreachably high, the whole thing framed in neon that winks off and on to mark the brisk scene changes. Okafor is very good at suggesting the way Louise’s personality is gradually honed into something resilient and hard. Blood subtly charts Mark’s incremental slide into wickedness, though the character of the worm who turns is more of a stereotype.
I can see why Turner thought it would be interesting to revive a play that looks at the effects of confinement and de-socialisation, and she does it well. I can also see why a lot of people wouldn’t want to see it right now.
