“Woods” by Robert Alan Evans, directed by Lucy Morrison @ Royal Court

“The Woods” by Robert Alan Evans, directed by Lucy Morrison (stage design by Naomi Dowson)

@ Royal Court, Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London, seen on 20 October 2018

The first thing I saw when entering the small auditorium in the attic of the Royal Court was the trees, thin bare trunks rising from the floor to the roof all across the floor-level stage flanked by chairs on two sides. There is a makeshift shed in this “wood” but I could not help thinking that the stage design was reusing the sets of Natalia Vorozhbit’s “Bad Roads” I saw there last year. But where in the latter the trees were denoting a certain wild, unexplored landscape in the depths of Eastern Europe, in “The Woods” the trees form part of the play’s imaginary world, monstrous branches growing into and through the heroine’s psyche, making her do the most horrible things imaginable but also offering a temporary refuge. Part of me felt that maybe there was little need for these second-hand sets (which I personally found quite tacky the first time round) and a verbal invocation would have sufficed (the same way as a storm is rendered here by sounds and mercifully no water is spilled).

This play is clearly part of a by now established tradition of theatrical storytelling (most recently I saw Alistair McDowal’s “X” and the film version of “Ghost Stories” by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman) where scenarios and plots familiar from popular cinema (sci-fi, horror, thriller) that occupy the largest portion of the narrative are at the end revealed to be images generated by the brain of the main character suffering from mental illness. But where the narrative of “The Woods” is the strongest is also where it may invite the most criticism: by refusing (to my knowledge and understanding) to follow this tradition faithfully and blurring the lines between “reality” and “delusion” the play creates a denser, more tangible and disturbing fabric but also loses in coherence and, possibly, fails to deliver a clear moral message (an absence I, for one, welcome).

The play presents a series of encounters between a woman and a man who claims to be her son; he

claims to love her her and he takes pleasure in making her suffer. Quite early on, thanks to a clever set design device (I’d never seen it used in the upstairs theatre before) where a section of the wall, usually darkened, is revealed to contain a family kitchen, complete with white goods, a family-sized pack of washing powder and a baby-monitor, we realise that something terrible must have happened to the heroine’s baby and that she is now somehow atoning for its death. The play goes through a number of scenes of terror and humiliation, and the fake exaggerated American accents the actors adopt in the earlier sections (and then gradually lose) seem to make a reference to the atmosphere of some 1980s American shocker. At a later point in the play, we clearly find ourselves in an NHS hospital and the “son” becomes first an over-worked and then a slightly sadistic doctor, taking his patient through even more torture than her condition is already imposing on her.

Even though ostensibly (and maybe not altogether successfully or tactfully) dealing with the painful topics of mental illness, post-partum depression and, possibly, society’s responsibility for the safety of its most vulnerable citizens, the play avoids fixing meaning, we never fully discover what is really happening, whether the heroine is suffering for a real crime or fears created by her condition, whether atonement and forgiveness in life are possible and whether the woman’s final departure from her mostly silent companion, a lost boy (or wolf?), signify her own death or give hope of redemption. Although leaving the theatre confused and slightly irritated, I felt grateful for the generosity of the play’s open structure and its power to deliver unsettling images without tying them up with a clear and unequivocal meaning.