The phrase "I could eat a horse" takes on new meaning in this RSC production that begins with a woman dragging a stinking horse across a field, which she then proceeds to swap for a small, starving boy.
Zinnie Harris's play is set in a frozen post-apocalyptic world where a long-running war has let death and starvation taint the land and the lives of the people. The past is another country, and these people are no longer the people they once were. To ensure their own survival they have become wary tricksters, dissemblers, unneighbourly and infected by cruelty. Even the midwinter sun seems changed, hanging in the sky like a pale moon.
Harris's play is written in a terse, iron-hard language that makes you sit up and listen as it plots the fracturing effect of war on identity, the way it destroys our humanity and makes us much less like ourselves. There are changes and transformations: a child called Sirin becomes Isaac, a blinded soldier returning from the war discovers that his wife thought him long dead, a wife turns out not be quite what she seems. The violence of war permeates these relationships as the child is viciously attacked by the person who should be his protector, and murder and mercy become entwined in a terrible act of savagery.
There is much that is good here. The acting is strong, the atmosphere is taut, and much is startlingly reminiscent of Edward Bond. But the piece feels too much like a parable and not enough like a play. There is something a tad smug about it.The lack of levity in the writing, and the fact that Harris is directing her own work (and has not therefore cut any of it), means that the 90 minutes soon becomes relentlessly grey and portentous. This particular horse continues to be flogged long after it has expired.
· Until March 19. Box office: 0870 429 6883.
