EV Crowe’s new play, The Sewing Group, is a sly thing. It begins in Shaker-like simplicity. Three women in long black dresses stitch in a plain wooden room. Two of them squinny with suspicion at the third. There are extended silences as they dip their needles into what look like squares of tapestry, though they say – imagine how scratchy – they are working on undergarments. In one of the brief scenes the only noise is a fart.
The audience is sharing space with people who know what it is to live without electronic noise, electric light, the blare of screens. But with farts. So we think. But there is a twist in this cryptic, arresting, Caryl Churchill-influenced play. It is important not to reveal the nature of this twist. Still, it spoils nothing to say that Crowe is looking at subjects that have long interested her: group coercion and the effect that modern technology has on affections, time and concentration. By the end of the evening, a quilt and a sampler look like examples of algorithms.
It is no accident that the director, Stewart Laing, is also the designer. This is a play that, apart from some final over-spelt-out moments, talks through images, and through the lighting of Mike Brookes. In between the brief candlelit scenes there is a blackout so total that actors, unable to see anything as they whisk around into new positions, have reported feeling unnerved, in constant fear of sitting on each other. The disorientation seems to have fed their performances. All of them suggest wariness exceptionally well; Fiona Glascott has particular eerie brightness. They seem to be holding back secrets, looking at ghosts.
• At the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, London until 23 Dec
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