A fascination with foxes runs through our literature, from Ben Jonson’s Volpone to David Garnett’s debut novel, Lady Into Fox, in which a 24-year-old woman turns into a vixen.
That peculiar obsession also haunts this strange one-man play by Titas Halder, which is virtuosically performed by Ben Aldridge but which left me, for want of a better word, slightly foxed.
Halder’s hero, Charlie, is clearly a wreck: he’s been dumped by his girlfriend, sacked from his job as a City trader and his sleepless nights are disturbed by the screams of an urban fox. To other residents on Charlie’s estate, the creature is a cat-mauling menace. But to Charlie, harking back to a childhood encounter, the fox becomes something to be observed, stalked, spoken to and even wrestled with as its vulpine presence, along with that of its kin, spreads panic through the streets.
What is one to make of all this? On one level, the play is an effective piece of contemporary gothic about one man’s need to find some rationale for his nervous breakdown.
Halder may also be providing a political parable in which the fox symbolises our demonisation of forces we fail to understand. Spread over seven episodes and supported by an electronic soundscape masterminded by onstage DJ Chris Bartholomew, the piece is overlong at 90 minutes but certainly shows Halder can write. Aldridge, in Hannah Price’s production, also excellently embodies the nightmares of a self-destructive Charlie, who finds in the bloodcurdling cries of the fox an echo of his own alienation. Weird is certainly the word.
• At Finborough, London, until 25 February. Box office: 0844-847 1652.
