I was going to avoid the most obvious spoiler about John Donnelly’s daftly entertaining play but it’s been described elsewhere as a “vampire comedy” and the programme is full of references to undead bloodsuckers. So yes, this is fairly silly, comic-gothic drama about contemporary London vampires but it’s also about psychological and societal breakdown. And it features a striking central performance from Sophie Melville as a young, overwhelmed mother of two.
We first see Melville’s waifish, high-strung Mia threatened by a sodcasting, suited thug on the tube even though she’s carrying her baby daughter Isla. She’s sleep-deprived because her upstairs neighbours play drum ‘n’ bass all night and her shlubby techie husband Joe (Bryan Dick) works odd hours intercepting communications for the police, possibly connected to mutilated and decapitated bodies found in the Thames.
When their young son Alfie bites another boy at school it prompts an explosive meeting between Mia and his teacher Ana (a silkily insinuating Laura Whitmore). This morphs into something approaching friendship until Ana offers to breastfeed Isla. Bit weird, thinks Mia. She doesn’t know the half of it.
Until the big reveal, the play is a jerky collage of darkly unsettling menace, that references countless horror films as well as Greek drama. Alfie is a creepy boy who wears a grotesque mask he made at school, and Mia’s fears about him accidentally echoing TV hit Adolescence. Actor Leander Deeny plays a series of threatening tossers, quite literally in one case. Underlying it all is a single, crystalline question: suppose a woman threatened by the world became the most terrifying figure on it? And underlying *that* is the question: what if it’s all in her mind?
That the various ambitious elements fail fully to coalesce in Blanche McIntyre’s production doesn’t stop it being an enjoyably absurd ride that both explores and explodes horror conventions. There’s been a small resurgence of ghost and sci-fi stories on stage: maybe this and the Menier’s current schlocky Dracula mean the old-school genre monsters are also getting a turn. Donnelly is best-known for The Pass, about a gay affair between footballers. So you can’t accuse him of being predictable.
There’s stuff about climate change and the death of humanity here too but his play is too short and skimpy to contain so many big ideas. It also gets utterly tangled up in the lore and the logistics of vampirism: there’s a great but self-defeating joke about Ana taking a teaching job because of the pension. McIntyre’s production is brisk, though, and the set, lighting and sound design are integrated into a striking, jarring whole. And Melville’s performance demands attention.
A committedly physical performer with the face of a movie star, she’s magnetic here as a woman suffering jitters that could be hormonal, psychological or supernatural. Whitmore ably delivers an underwritten role soaked in melodrama with one moment of great theatrical flair. It’s no accident she’s another glamorous blonde: Donnelly’s influences include the subgenre of lubricious lesbian vampire films.
Hampstead Theatre, once the home of new writing, hasn’t had a hit with a new play in ages. This rickety assemblage doesn’t break the dry spell, but it is provocative and fun and brings a neglected genre back to the stage. Werewolves next?
Hampstead Theatre, to April 26; hampsteadtheatre.com
