Hideki Noda’s unnerving and occasionally brutal play, which was first staged in the UK in 2006, returns to Soho with Kathryn Hunter again taking the lead role. The eerily versatile Hunter plays Mr Ido, a Japanese salaryman, who returns home from work one night to find that his wife and child have been taken hostage by an escaped convict. But Ido has no interest in playing the victim for the sake of the cameras. In retaliation he takes the convict’s wife and son hostage and quickly begins exacting his revenge. Ido proves to be quite good at this. Indeed he seems to derive a degree of pride in the process, adjusting with alarming rapidity to his new role as aggressor.
The satirical bite of the play is sometimes blunter than it might be but Hunter is, as ever, a captivating and utterly convincing stage presence and the cross-gender casting - Noda plays the convict’s increasingly catatonic wife - often heightens the horror of the situation making for a production that is by turns repellent and compelling. The pace slows considerably as Ido settles into the convict’s home and a strange, chilling sense of domesticity is established but this only makes the play more disquieting. Miriam Buether’s bold, bright, mirrored set compliments the tone of the production perfectly.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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