Tom Scutt is one of British theatre’s most adventurous designers, determined to win more visibility for the craft he practises. Here he makes his debut as a director with a lucid and genuinely sinister version of Peter Strickland’s 2012 film about a British sound engineer who travels to Seventies Italy to work on a brutal horror film.
Tom Brooke, recently seen in the BBC’s Bodyguard, plays audio expert Gilderoy. He’s adept at suggesting the nerdy innocence and bewilderment of a man whose usual life in suburbia is absurdly humdrum. Later, as Gilderoy’s sanity frays and he grows fixated with the film’s difficult ending, Brooke has a haunted, hollowed-out intensity.
The stage is dominated by a control room — Scutt has created the detailed set with Anna Yates. We only briefly see the film’s manipulative director Santini (Luke Pasqualino), and we never witness the violence of its most extreme scenes. Instead we focus on the awkward power dynamic between callous producer Francesco (Enzo Cilenti) and the cast and crew, in particular Lara Rossi’s defiant and much-abused Silvia. Yet we’re left in no doubt of the film’s enormities and as the set fills up with bizarre props and mutilated vegetables, the distressed Gilderoy increasingly resembles a demented shaman.
Unlike in Strickland’s film, the visual trickery is limited. But then this adaptation is arguably a rebuff to the highly visual nature of modern culture. It’s certainly a statement about the dramatic potential of what we hear and the influence of whoever governs it. Brothers Ben and Max Ringham, together with Tom Espiner, have conjured the show’s soundscape and it’s a remarkable achievement — richly textured, at times oppressive, and occasionally mind-expanding.
Until March 30, for tickets: 020 3282 3808, donmarwarehouse.com
