View from the Green Room: Basement pot-boiler
The Dark Room
A shrouded figure sits on a chair in a dimly lit room as we enter. A sinister figure enters and removes the shroud to reveal a young woman bound to a chair who rails against the light and asks all the questions on the audience’s lips… ”where am I…what am I doing here?…how did I get here?...who are you?..."
This is Kafka in a basement. Or Trump’s ICE warriors.
David’s silence and indifference to Ellen’s plight is classic Kafka. Mind games are his pleasure. His comments sit repetitively in the darkness, as do her screams and pleas for mercy… "my wrists are numb…please…please…I’m begging you…”
David’s matter-of-fact conversation is chilling… ”I need you to listen to me…when you listen I'll set you free…I’m not going to harm you…”
David is marginally rational… "I’m not a pervert” intones the hand-up-pants-down fruitcake. After all, what better way to secure a one-to-one conversation than to drug and abduct a young dumb blonde and tie her up in a basement? Swipe right and kidnap.
David is about to discover that – on the scale of bad ideas that runs from zero to invading Russia in the winter – this is number 467! Because Ellen is anything but dumb. She’s smart and articulate and feisty. More than a match for the man who discovers that committing a crime is the easy part. Getting away with it is a helluva lot more complicated.
“I need you to listen… I’ll make you understand," says he. But when Ellen walks him through the massive holes in his plot – buying the spike for her drink in a nightclub from a customer… witnesses… CCTV in club and car park where he placed the supposedly drunken girl to his car… etc etc – he hasn’t got any answers.
Derek Flynn’s script is an interesting narrative with lots of will-he-won’t-she stuff going on as the plot powers its way along. Unfortunately, the plotline is quite repetitive as the power base shifts inexorably back and forth.
Conversations go back on themselves as the tied-up twosome engage in verbal battles that frequently sparkle with black humour... "I’ve had worse nights,” declares and exasperated Ellen.
BUT…when the twist comes – and no, I didn’t see it coming – the darkness of the room envelopes the audience. A wordy script suddenly becomes more urgent and conflict steps up a gear.
Performances are beyond intense. Derek Flynn – who writes and directs the piece – is a barrel of frogs as each element of David’s personality jumps forward out of the darkness. Nicola Spendlove is superb as the crafty, feisty, passive-aggressive victim that employs every aspect of her engaging personality to gain the upper hand in the duel. The electricity between the pair is the driver of the narrative.
The Dark Room certainly captures all our attention.
