Artists often talk about their “dark remakes” of traditional stories, but choreographer Arthur Pita makes everyone else’s idea of dark look like CBeebies. And his source material here is bleak to start with: Hans Christian Andersen’s The Story of a Mother, in which Death comes for a woman’s child and she journeys to beg for her baby’s life.
The Mother could be seen as the successor to Pita’s award-winning The Metamorphosis, from 2011. It is a horror-tinged vehicle for a star ballet dancer – in this case Natalia Osipova – who is not afraid to get their hands dirty in dance-theatre. Or get her dress covered in blood, her body tangled in thorny vines and her eyes gouged out.
It is gruesome, chilling and nightmarish. Pita’s all-encompassinggothic-fetish aesthetic is impressively realised with the help of designer Yann Seabra, lighting designer David Plater, and musicians Frank Moon and Dave Price, who play live, flanking the stage with a panoply of instruments and producing eerily scratching strings, crashing cymbals and haunting Russian folk melodies.
The rotating rooms of the set are grimly atmospheric, with peeling paint and the soul-piercing cries of a squalling baby. We begin with Osipova broken with exhaustion, anxiety and isolation, and wonder where there is to go from there. The answer is through cycles of fear, grief, numbness and delusion, with Osipova utterly lost inside her character.
She spins feverishly across the small stage, but often her steps are the least interesting element. She never quite loses her ballerina poise: at her most wretched she is still cleanly grand jete-ing and pointing toes to the ceiling in a 180-degree split for no good reason. Her co-star, a shape-shifting Jonathan Goddard, plays all the other parts, all of Death’s myriad faces – sadistic babushka, glittery gimp, glamorous gardener in Dior dress and heels – and is terrifically unnerving and slinkily sinister.
Pita’s production is rich with metaphoric possibility. It could echo any mother’s journey in its darkest hours: the bloody brutality of childbirth, the dissociation of sleep deprivation, the self-sacrifice of parenthood. It’s a hellish tour de force that should come with a trigger warning.
• At the Southbank Centre, London, until 22 June.
