Caryl Churchill’s punchy dystopian drama seems so prescient it’s hard not to imagine the playwright had her own crystal ball when she wrote it in 2000. The events in the final sequence, when even nature has gone to war and the elephants have defected to the Dutch and the weather is siding with the Japanese, may seem fantastical. But this twisted fairytale clearly demonstrates that if you declare war on the world, the world will declare war on you. You inevitably end up waging war on yourself, and distrusting those closest to you.
It begins in the dead of night as a child, Joan, is woken by screams. She witnesses atrocities, but her evasive aunt (Tamzin Griffin) persuades her to accept the explanations rather than believe the evidence seen with her own eyes. Churchill shows what happens when we refuse to grow up and take responsibility for what is being done in our name.
This strange, unsettling piece needs to be directed with steely rigour, and it isn’t quite tough enough in JMK award-winner Kate Hewitt’s revival, which is staged on the traverse in the tiny Clare space. Even so, there’s a terrific, layered performance from Samantha Colley as the adult Joan, a young woman who worries about corruption in the hat factory where she works, alongside Todd (a very good Ariyon Bakare), but who completely accepts the trials and executions for which she helps make prize-winning millinery.
With designer Georgia Lowe, Hewitt finds an ingenious, haunting way to stage the ghastly parade of hats without a cast of hundreds, but the intimacy of the space works against the play. It diminishes the troubling power of this 50-minute epic, which offers a wake-up call as we sleepwalk towards disaster.
• Until 29 November. Box office: 020-7922 2922. Venue: Young Vic, London.
• Never mind 1984: Michael Billington’s top five theatrical dystopias
• My hero: Caryl Churchill by Sadie Jones
