by John Donnelly’s new piece is a perception of early parenthood, especially the way in which the arrival of a baby tests her relationship. In particular, he captures the strange combination of guarantee and fragility in which families adopt shape. The designer Tom Piper has shrunk the wide stage of Hampstead and surrounded it by not only creating a feeling for life in construction, but also the precious of a family unit that is protected from danger. Donnelly’s drama suggests a kind of 100-minute cortisol clearance as a mother and father fight against fighting or flight reactions. Despite the nuanced domestic background, the wobile and thriller elements of the Apex Predator are bloodless, if not literally.
Mia and Joe live with her 11-year-old son Alfie and the five-month-old Isla in London. Joe is often gone for the work of a sensitive, classified nature. Mia is desperately desperately and tightened by the noise of the neighbors on the upper floor. To make things worse, Alfie bitten other children, but his art teacher Ana is here to help. Perhaps she could give Alfie additional free tuition fees, take Mia with a served evening, maybe offer her own breast for Isla to suck?
A spoiler is probably required here: this piece contains vampires. Between the wine glasses wine (played with a clever, icy smile from Laura Whitmore) is a bloodsucker and Mia (the always adhering Sophie Melville) receives her poison. Vampirism is presented as an act of self-occupation in order to deal with the abundant dangers of the world, although these “apex predators” are traditionally cursed to a rather miserable existence.
Joe (Bryan Dick) is indeed a very modern kind of vampire hunter: he monitors encrypted online forums that are visited by deceived souls that believe as an undead. The reality blurred against nightmare, dark comedy is sometimes awkward with horror and scenes from the couple’s apartment, the school and the examination room of the local family doctor. The production of Blanche Mcintyre is more confusing than annoying despite the district of Chris Shutt’s sound design. Cutting the interval would help to drive the relegation of the story, and the direction of movement of Ingrid Mackinnon could be increased in a staging that does not melt the components of the piece as masterfully as the not unlike that puts the rights under control.
Whitmores vampire has an inadequate uncanny: there is never the feeling of a tired being that the country has been pursuing for hundreds of years, persecuted London in flames in London and observed “a man named Burbage”. While the Hold Ana is not convinced about Mia, Donnelly writes a biting, funny dialogue for Mia and Joe. The humorous lines that Leander Deeny gave as one of the victims of Ana are less successful.
The scenes of Nebly Parental Psychodrama are similarly alive for Morgan Lloyd Malcolms 2021 Drama Mum, in which Melville also played the leading role. But basically that Donnelly’s ambitious game is successful, you have to feel swept into your supernatural world and I just didn’t bite.
