How do you put on stage someone who is bored with being themselves? Without boring the audience. How do you suggest a dissolving identity in the fleshiest of forms, the theatre? This is the dilemma faced in The Red Barn.
David Hare’s adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel La Main pulls the first-person narrative out of the troubled protagonist’s head and puts it into dialogue. Robert Icke’s production – performed to the sound of a metronome – turns its actors into mannequins: all withheld, all dancing to the same tune.
A man thinks he has committed one murder. He goes on to kill someone else. Yet this is hardly a thriller: there is no moment of total terror. It is darker than that. A novel of stealth and of watching, in which crime is daily life continued by other means. Dead marriages; dead bodies. Bunny Christie’s design encloses the stage in black screens that slide around the action, opening and closing like the shutter of a camera, or the wink of an eye, ushering in the fiercest of storms, welcoming the grandest of beige apartments. Mark Strong moves from bland to bludgeoning as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Elizabeth Debicki – unruffled and immaculate – who shows her recklessness in the sudden drop of her voice. Not galvanising. But mesmeric.
