Art to get your teeth into

Some of it's bloody good

Laura Whitmore and Sophie Melville

It’s spring, and apparently the vampires are rising with the sap.

What I’ve seen

After the Menier Chocolate Factory’s silly vampire romp Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors (which I wrote about here) comes John Donnelly’s ’genre-busting’ drama Apex Predator at the Hampstead Theatre, which is entirely held up by a superb performance by its star, Sophie Melville.

Committedly physical, radiating nervous energy but never quite overdoing it, she plays Mia, a harried young mother of two whose husband is doing some kind of weird surveillance job for the police that he can’t talk about and which takes him away for days at a time. She hasn’t had a decent sleep for months because she has a baby and the neighbours keep playing shit drum ‘n’ bass all night, and her elder son Alfie is drawing some disturbing stuff in art class. The world terrifies her; her anxiety is through the roof.

Enter Alfie’s slightly weird art teacher, Ana (played competently by Laura Whitmore, in a role it’s necessarily hard to warm to), who senses a kindred spirit in Mia and offers her an unorthodox way to reclaim her power.

Hear the London Theatre Review team review this show, Rhinoceros and many more on the podcast - find it here or wherever you normally get them.

It’s a vampire play, basically, but it’s a bit of a mess. I don’t think you can fall back on ‘genre busting’ simply because you don’t quite know what it is. It’s quite fun, the script is entertaining, and it’s got a lot of ideas in it - the constant fear that accompanies the state of womanhood, male violence, the borderline desperation driven by the exhaustion of motherhood, a suggestion of post-partum psychosis, the vampire thing - but it’s all touched on and not really dealt with, so it’s hard to know what it’s about.

I’m all in favour of putting genre fiction onstage, but the ending makes literally no sense, undercuts the horror somehow, and generally feels like Donnelly had bitten off more than he could chew. That’s on until April 26.

Eugène Ionesco wrote Rhinoceros, which is on at the Almeida theatre until April 26, in 1959, in Paris, in the wake of the Second World War. It was largely read as being about the rise of Fascism, but Ionesco was adamant that its commentary shouldn’t be limited to what had just happened - instead it was about how quickly people feel the need to conform and how easily they can move away from what they think of as their fixed moral standards in the face of a mainstream shift.

And lo, here we find ourselves again with the contemporary relevance of something written in the shadow of authoritarianism depressing the shit out of us.

It’s bonkers, of course, being so avant-garde and weird that it’s now practically establishment. Beranger, played by a dishevelled Șopé Dìrísù, about as far as you can get from the action hero he’s been playing recently in Gangs of London and elsewhere, is a well-meaning, naive, troubled soul, an alcoholic who struggles to cope with the world as he sees it.

He’s also the only person who consistently questions what’s going on, when people in his little town, which may or may not be in France, start turning into rhinoceroses left, right and centre.