Alistair McDowall’s plays are portals to the extraordinary. Following genre-tweaking excursions through fantasy (Pomona), sci-fi (X) and time-travel (The Glow), his trilogy of solo plays may be even more audacious – unfolding the experience of ordinary life from the inside. And these giddying texts are given astonishing life by Kate O’Flynn.
Northleigh, 1940 was inspired by the wartime history of McDowall’s own home outside Manchester. Pressed by the ashy walls of Merle Hensel’s set, it is bookended by apocalyptic visions, jolting into quizzical realism as O’Flynn’s speaker (an avid fantasy reader – books with “crude illustrations of tentacled monsters on the cover”) joins her father in the Morrison shelter, a wire-mesh structure on the dining room floor. Their chat sidles around candour; where is her authentic self?
Elliot Griggs’ lighting transforms the environment: In Stereo’s walls seem mottled with mould, a nerve-jangled narrator probing the stains. O’Flynn’s voiceover is like a baleful Victoria Wood (“I was going all in with the sprays and the bleaches”), but fractures into competing voices, whirring and layered in Melanie Wilson’s disorienting sound design. As cacophony subsides, the voice sinks into the wall itself, observing successive generations – their sex, death and ornaments – like a climate-change Beckett, gradually falling to rubble.
All of It – first seen in 2020 – is genius. A journey from birth to void, McDowall brilliantly captures how febrile consciousness scribbles around our spoken half-truths (mostly, “it’s fine”). O’Flynn – barely moving on her high stool – digs into the rhythms as she grows from fierce toddler, eyes scudding about to absorb new information, into boy-haunted adolescence.
Grinding adult routine gradually subsumes the darting present-ness of childhood. “Driving to work” is a repeated skein of dreariness, cut only by flaring squabbles with her own daughter. The intensity dims, O’Flynn’s eyes lose their spark. That’s not the end of the story – even as regrets rattle through the years, there’s a richness to the things we keep close and continue to discover.
“Think I had a good life, but it’s hard to tell really,” she says towards the end. “I don’t have anything to compare.” McDowall and O’Flynn make it seem breathlessly full – barely 45 minutes but an epic of inner life.
• At the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Royal Court, London, until 17 June
