The Collector

Published Monday 8 September 2008 at 13:15 by Mark Shenton

Plays often hold up a mirror to our lives and thoughts. But is the reverse sometimes true, too, with life literally imitating art? What’s cause and what’s effect?

Those chilling thoughts are doubly amplified in the case of a creepily effective stage adaptation of John Fowles’ first novel, The Collector, originally published in 1963 and subsequently made into a film in 1965, that now plays out as a horribly plausible real-life saga.

That’s particularly thanks to the recent cases in Austria of Natascha Kampusch and the family of Josef Fritzl, who were held captive in basement prisons for years.

Various abductors and killers have claimed the story as the basis for their crimes, but whether directly connected to them or not, there are disturbing and frightening parallels as Miranda, an attractive young student from St Martin’s College of Art, is abducted from the streets of London by Frederick Clegg, a lonely butterfly collector intent on turning her into another of his prized possessions, and holds her captive in the basement home he has converted specially for her.

Actor-turned-director Ben Caplan keeps the tensions between them razor-sharp, and even if Rosalind Drury’s understandably uptight demeanour seems initially stagey, she grows in conviction as her character’s predicament becomes ever more dire and desperate. Mark Fleishmann’s Frederick offers a study in calmly plausible psychosis that is unnervingly chilling, registering changes in his emotional temperature via tiny movements of the muscles in his face.

Beck Rainford’s set and Richard Howell’s lighting contribute effectively to the oppressive sense of claustrophobia and confinement that Mark Healy’s adaptation engenders.