There are no fleas on the Australian playwright Rita Kalnejais, who gives us this fable about the love affair between a teenage boy and a female fox. There is no funnier or more startling play in London, and if the evening doesn’t quite sustain itself into the gothic, bloody ending, there is plenty to admire and even more to enjoy in this Romeo and Juliet with fur, directed with delicious swagger by Steve Marmion.
Basti is a sad, underdeveloped 14-year-old who is bullied at school and whose mother has had a nervous breakdown. He wants to cheer her up by making her a fur stole out of one of the urban foxes that visit the garden nightly. But when Rdeca, a young vixen out on her own for the first time, gets caught in his trap, the two discover that they can understand each other and bond. As chat-up lines go, offering to rid your potential lover of her fleas is probably hard to beat.
Kalnejais’s play offers plenty to ponder in our attitudes towards animals, particularly those we kill to eat, and features a couple of hilarious chickens, a fatalistic mole and a brutish guard dog. The dynamics of grief and family and the role of the male also come in for some scrutiny, whether it’s Rdeca’s absent father, who died for a kebab, or Basti’s dad, who thinks nothing of flaunting his sexual conquests in front of his young son and believes that violence is part of being a man.
Hayley Carmichael is just heart-breaking as the mother fox, raising her family alone, and alert to the cruelties of humans. If the evening doesn’t quite fulfil its promise, it’s utterly distinctive and always wild at heart.
- At Soho theatre, London, until 21 November. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
