It looks as if a bomb has gone off in a toyshop – the stage is scattered with plastic dumper trucks, fluffy bears and rabbits, counting and spelling games. Amid this childish mess, the title character slumps at her kitchen table with some more adult debris: three empty wine bottles.
In Jean-Pierre Baro’s unnerving production of a play by the French dramatist Magali Mougel (translated by Chris Campbell), the battlefield of playthings is the visible evidence of the three living contradictions of Suzy Storck’s youthful certainty that she would live and die childless. There is a chilling possibility that the second part of this ambition can still be fulfilled by this reluctant mother of three. That gives a fearfully brooding feeling to a piece that, like TV’s Doctor Foster, explores the limits of maternal instinct. Both works are modern versions of the ultimate bad-mother drama, Medea, though with final twists not envisaged by Euripides.
It’s unclear why Suzy – nudgingly surnamed after the fabled baby-carrier – so regrets and resents her offspring. Postnatal depression, perhaps, or a metaphor for societal expectation, or the control that male politicians and priests exert over women’s fertility? Suzy has worked in a chicken factory, and has herself ended up on a domestic production line.
But the show’s power lies less in its message than its media: a hangover-hurting sunrise blazes through the kitchen window, and a TV screen variously shows poultry plucking, a maggoty dead sheep that the young Suzy saw and foetal scans. Baro’s staging includes a striking use of volunteer audience participation, which puts theatregoers on their hands and knees beside the actors.
Like London’s current favourite French playwright, Florian Zeller (The Lie), Mougel plays with viewpoint and alternative interpretations. The script switches between punchy domestic dialogue, monologues, and commentary (“A fly’s stuck in the window. Upstairs the children are thundering about”) ominously delivered by Theo Solomon – identified, in another wink at Greek tragedy, as Chorus.
Caoilfhionn Dunne viscerally portrays Suzy’s physical and psychological decline, from bright-eyed to hollow-eyed, confident to crushed. Kate Duchêne’s Madam Storck embodies an older ideal of motherhood, and Jonah Russell gives the husband subtleties that keep the audience guessing about how loving or hateful he is.
- At the Gate theatre, London, until 18 November. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
