Emma Donoghue has written eloquently about how Room, first a novel, and last year a movie, is peculiarly well suited to the stage: is, indeed, an image of the theatre. Triggered by the case of Josef Fritzl, it shows two people locked in a small space conjuring up a world. And of course all audiences are involved in a (mostly benign) kidnap: held hostage to someone else’s dream.
Donoghue’s originality lies in showing imprisonment through a child’s eyes and making a routine outside world seem more illusory than the constricted, abnormal room. The five-year-old thinks seas and lakes are too big to exist, except on television. When released, he looks at stairs with alarm – as broken-up floors. Cora Bissett’s production captures these ideas, but lacks the dynamism that would make it indelible. Lily Arnold’s design projects an infant’s spidery drawings and laborious cursive script. When fear flares, a brightly crayoned scrawl of fire pops up. It is ingenious, but fringed with whimsy. Desperation should give delight a dark edge; here it comes in with a tinge of cuteness.
Music by Bissett and Kathryn Joseph does not swim through the action: songs pop up as soliloquies. Witney White delivers them thoughtfully – troubled and earnest as the mother. As does Fela Lufadeju, who shadows the child actor, expressing his precociously grown-up mind. Meanwhile the tiny Harrison Wilding is wide-eyed, accepting, bewildered, an infant on whom you can see his surroundings being written. We are living in an age of brilliant child actors: of Billy Elliots, Matildas and, from last week, The Ferryman’s band of foul-mouthed doxies. Perhaps we are also about to see a shift in London’s theatrical geography. Ten minutes by train from Stratford’s Theatre Royal, the Yard is sending out ripples from Hackney Wick. Is east the new theatrical west?
• Room is at Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London, until 3 June
