PATRICK MARMION reviews Apex Predator: Yes the title sounds promising, but John Donnelly's muddled new play is as bloodless as its victims
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Apex Predator (Hampstead Theatre, London)
It's a horror show at the Hampstead Theatre. John Donnelly’s muddled new play, ostensibly the tale of a young mother suffering from severe post-natal depression, turns into a one-woman, blood-sucking revenge mission against toxic masculinity.
How did it all go wrong? Well, after discovering her ten-year-old son’s primary school teacher is a 200-year old vampire, our formerly miserable mum becomes the ‘apex predator’ of the title in a mirthless, Hammer horror rerun of Killing Eve.
Despite some snappy dialogue, Donnelly’s sketchy characters give the actors little to go on.
Sophie Melville is a powerhouse performer with not much more to do than look confused and jiggle her newborn baby doll, as if out horse-riding.
Bryan Dick has the most advanced sense of self as her bewildered husband with a secret job in the Met Police.
And former Love Island presenter Laura Whitmore is a suspiciously glamorous primary school teacher who turns out to be a human mosquito.
Awkwardly staged on Tom Piper’s design of a bland white kitchen marooned in a black void surrounded by scaffolding, Blanche McIntyre’s production fails to spook us with uncertainty about what’s real and what’s not.
Just about anything can and does happen. And, most dismally, the fourth cast member, Leander Deeny, is hung out to dry in a series of nasty misogynistic stereotypes — some of which he tries to salvage as comedy.
Yes the title sounds promising, but the play itself is as bloodless as its victims.
Rhinoceros (Almeida Theatre, London)
Played fast and furious, Ionesco’s absurdist 1959 totalitarian satire about the inhabitants of a French town turning into rhinos (symbolising the abolition of individual freedom and surrender to the herd instinct) might be a beast worth reviving.
Alas, adaptor and director Omar Elerian’s attempt does not convince. Eager to underline the artifice of theatre, he has created a compere (Paul Hunter introduces himself a ‘provocateur’) to warm up the audience.
On a space resembling a rehearsal room, actors in white coats and clownish hairdos follow his stage directions, carving out the unseen set.
He introduces the locals. One can’t find an invisible door. Another is out of time with the homemade sound effects. Another is a lady with a cat.
Actually, she is cradling a large watermelon. When, bafflingly, rhinos rampage through the town, the ‘cat’ is squashed; the watermelon splitting to reveal its blood-red flesh.
It’s all mildly diverting physical comedy, well-drilled certainly, but less than witty and anything but menacing.
At the interval, kazoos are issued to some members of the audience as well as the cast. In the second half, their bathetic sounds suggest the roar of rhinos, with the provocateur now functioning as their conductor.
Meanwhile, on stage, Jean (Joshua McGuire) is in agony because a rhino horn is pushing its way through his head.
The process completed, Jean cuts a ridiculous figure in a shiny grey body-stocking with a silly little tail.
His neighbours are starting to follow suit (quite literally, in grey trousers). They stomp about, kazooing madly.
Mercifully, by now the stage directions have stopped and some ‘real’ acting begins at last — largely thanks to downbeat Berenger (excellent Ṣọpáşą́ DìrĂsĂą, of Gangs Of London), who has always refused to conform, wearing his own clothes, drinking too much.
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