Relocated

Published Monday 16 June 2008 at 10:20 by Aleks Sierz

Although he is often seen as the big, bad daddy of in-yer-face theatre, playwright Anthony Neilson could more accurately be described as one of the most serious investigators of extreme states of mind working in British theatre today.

In his latest surreal thriller, he examines the haunting feelings associated with crimes against children. The result is guaranteed to shake you up.

But instead of telling a straight story with a logical plot that explains the mind of a killer, Neilson creates a mysterious ambience in which a series of puzzling domestic scenes conjure up troubling echoes of a child abduction, the murder of two schoolgirls and a monstrous man who holds a young woman captive in a cellar. In one scene, the house where a murder took place haunts its later occupants, at another time, a murderer has to be relocated.

Deliberately opaque, the fragmentary incidents gel into an overall sense of dread, distress and dismay. Although there is little explicit horror, the feeling of darkness and fear comes across in designer Miriam Buether’s claustrophobic, skewed black-box set, with its simple furniture bathed in Chahine Yavroyan’s crepuscular lighting.

As usual, Neilson directs a cast which is outstanding in its commitment to a project that began with no script or characters. Frances Grey, Phil McKee, Stuart McQuarrie, Katie Novak, Jan Pearson and Nicola Walker are alive to every nuance of this dark mystery, and manage to find some much-needed humour in these scenes of terror and sadness. The Royal Court should be congratulated for staging this unique and experimental show.