APEX Predator – Psychodrama Supernatural Psychodrama died more than it may chew | Theater
JOhn Donnelly’s new comedy is perceptive on the first parenting, in particular the way in which the arrival stress of a child test of your relationship. In particular, the strange combination of surety and fragility in which families take shape. The designer Tom Piper reduced the wide stage of Hampstead and surrounded him from scaffolding to create a meaning not only of lives under construction, but also the preciousness of a family unit repaired by the danger. Donnelly’s drama suggests a sort of 100 -minute cortisol release as a mother and father fight with combat or flight responses. But despite the nuanced domestic background, the supernatural elements and thrillers intertwined with Apex Predator are without blood, although not literally.
Mia and Joe live in London with their 11 -year -old son, Alfie, and five months. Joe is often far away for a sensitive and classified work. Mia is pushed to despair from the deprivation of sleep, exacerbated by the noise of the neighbors on the upper floor. To worsen things, Alfie has bitten other children, but her art teacher, Ana, is here to help. Perhaps he could give Alfie some extra less charges of free charge, take mine in an alcoholic evening, perhaps to offer his breast for Isla to suck?
A spoiler is probably required: this game contains vampires. Among a glass of wine in a little wine, Ana (played with a smart and icy smile by Laura Whitmore) proves to be a suck of blood and mine (the ever arresting Sophie Melville) receives her poison. Vampirism is presented as an act of self-need to face the abundant dangers of the world, despite the fact that these “apice predators” are traditionally cursed in a rather miserable existence.
Joe (Bryan Dick) is actually a very modern sort of vampire hunter: he monitors the encrypted online forums visited by deluded souls who believe as not dead. The reality is blurred with the nightmare, the dark comedy is sometimes awkwardly coupled with horror and scenes of the couple of the couple, the school and the examination room of the local GP merge together. The production of Blanche McIntyre, despite Chris Shutt’s brackets of the sound design, is more disconcerting than disturbing. Cutting the interval would help to push the descent of the story and the direction of the Moved Mackinnon movement could be accentuated in a staging that cannot merge the components of the comedy masterfully as dissimilar Let the right one enter.
Whitmore’s vampire has an unchanged incredibility: there is never the meaning of a tired being who persecuted the earth for hundreds of years, assisting London on fire and looking “a man called Burbage”. While the Ana grip on Mia is not convincing, Donnelly writes shooting dialogues and fun for mine and Joe, their warm topics realistically transmitted by Melville and Dick, always aware that Alfie (played this performance by Callum Knowenden) is in the ear. The humorous lines provided to Leander Deeny, as one of Ana’s victims, are less successful.
His scenes as psychodrama of foggy parents are equally vivid to the 2021 drama by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm Momwho also played Melville. But basically, so that Donnelly’s ambitious game is successful, you have to feel swept in his supernatural world and I have not bitten.
