These two plays in the RSC's New Work Festival have a lot in common. Both are by young women. Both take place in a world rent by catastrophe. Both use blindness as a metaphor. But where Zinnie Harris's Midwinter has the force of a moral fable, Joanna Laurens's Poor Beck is a confusing allegory.
Harris's play starts ominously with a young woman, Maud, dragging a dead horse on stage: instead of flogging it, however, as I half feared, she barters it for a starving, silent child. And when her lover, long presumed dead, returns from an unnamed war she passes the boy off as their own. What follows is a strangely gripping story in which Maud battles for possession of the child with his natural grandfather and the soldier is afflicted by a blindness-inducing parasite.
I was reminded strongly of Edward Bond, in that Harris uses potently direct language to create a complex parable. War, she implies, destroys not only civilisations but our own sense of personal identity; the soldier returns from battle with an acquired violence, Maud becomes an habitual deceiver, and the boy is stripped of speech.
But abstraction is kept at bay by Harris's own rivetingly specific production, in which Ruth Gemmell, combining maternal longing with manipulative shrewdness, gives a thrilling performance as the multi-faceted Maud. Pal Aron as the blinded soldier and John Normington as the tenacious grandad are equally good.
If Harris is in control of her imagination, Laurens has allowed hers to run away with her. What she has done in Poor Beck is to relocate an Ovidian incest myth, in which Myrrha sleeps with her kingly father, to a postapocalypse universe. I could not help feeling, however, that if mankind were driven underground by a nuclear or ecological disaster, preservation of normal family standards would be the least of its problems.
Admittedly the whole thing is staged with great flair by Daniel Fish, and Greg Hicks as the blind patriarch shows he can give even the simplest line a keening resonance.
But all Laurens's play, which has already finished its brief run, proves is that classical myth and futurist nightmare make queasily strange bedfellows.
· Midwinter at The Swan until October 16. Box Office: 01789 403492
