Writer: John Donnelly
Director: Blanche McIntyre
A hideous altercation takes place on the underground, the kind city dwellers dread. A random stranger perceives himself to be looked at the wrong way and kicks off in an expletive-filled volcanic eruption. This is our first introduction to Mia’s life, a young mother living fearfully in London.
She resides in an attractive apartment with her hard-working partner, who does night shifts in an undisclosed line of work, and her young son Alfie, who’s having problems fitting in at school. He often wears a sinister mask on stage, part of his art project and likes the idea that masks “reveal as much as they conceal.” Mia, still breastfeeding her new baby, is battered by the physical and emotional demands of family life and motherhood. Might she be experiencing post-natal blues, again? “If I saw myself on the street, I wouldn’t recognise myself” she admits.
Apex Predator, a new play by John Donnelley (his most recent works are adaptations of Chekov’s The Seagull and Molière’s Tartuffe) is a bright and witty tale of modern life…and vampires. This production, entertaining and slick, starts in one place and finishes in quite another, with a radical tonal shift. This family drama, one with regular suburban aspirations of raising a family to be happy and safe soon spirals into a supernatural tale of hunters and the hunted and in doing so redefines the idea of what a protective, maternal instinct might look like.
The dramatic catalyst is the arrival of Alfie’s new teacher, Ana – alluringly performed by Laura Whitmore, who has some unorthodox views and behaviour. Yes, Alfie did bite a child “but it was a great bite”. Later, she suggests that perhaps Mia has lost touch with the “animal side” of herself. For detectives in the audience, these are useful if not subtle, clues for what follows.
The injection of supernatural storytelling into the ordinary, domestic, and everyday is an equation that has worked memorably on TV with dramas such as The Walking Dead, (Zombies in shopping malls) and the French drama, The Returned, which takes place in a small mountain village, but surprisingly it’s a genre that has been less mined on stage. Perhaps the enormous commercial success of Stranger Things will usher in a new era of vampires, wolves, and zombies in the footlights.
Mia’s arc, vividly expressed by Sophie Melville takes her from a place of vulnerability, dread and powerlessness where she avoids conflict, to one where she’s in control of her life, world, and family. Her libido returns with a primal vengeance, and everything burns more brightly. Her growing relationship with Ana, who true to her predator’s instincts finds a way into the family home, is one of shifting reversals. Who needs who more?
A love letter to London this is not, but more of a poison pen letter to a chaotic, noisy city full of angry, unresolved individuals, it’s a city where strangers are piled on top of strangers, the pressures of work can break the closest ties and forming close connections is an almost unreachable goal. The urban isolation and anxiety are palpable made explicit by the sound (Christopher Shutt) and lighting choices (Jack Knowles) that work powerfully well to recreate a barrage of urban commotion alongside the shifts from light to dark.
Men come off particularly badly in Apex Predator; they are pests and vermin and need to be dealt with as such. The female predators who lead this story while in some ways subvert the traditional male-dominated trope of the blood-sucking vampire also have one foot in the tradition of film noir, femme fatale archetypes. Women are the spiders and men are the flies and Melville, who scuttles about the stage at high speed, when threatened or experiencing cold turkey, has something araneidan in her movements, a great touch from director Blanche McIntyre and movement director, Ingrid Mackinnon.
When Mia lists the number of things that keep her awake during a visit to her GP, everything from paying bills to bodily decay and being caught in a terrorist attack, it’s something everyone can relate to. Metaphorically, perhaps the vampire motif represents the blood-sucking fear that drains the lifeforce and pleasure from daily, urban existence. The philosophy that underpins the belief systems of the key characters is spartan. In a tougher, harsher, colder, less caring world, only the fittest will survive.
Come the apocalypse, only cockroaches and vampires will survive, perhaps presided over by cryogenically preserved figureheads of presidential estate agents and tech squillionaires. For a play with such a bleak premise, Apex Predator offers an entertaining 1 hour and 40 minutes of theatre. Put a Bloody Mary on hold for the interval.
Runs until 26 April 2025
