Theatre: How to Fight Loneliness

Park theatre, London N4; until 24 May

The set, designed by Mona Camille, initially suggests a post-apocalyptic dissonance. Jodie (Justina Kehinde) and Brad (Archie Backhouse) are anxiously awaiting an important guest in their suburban living room, but the carpet is sand and scrub and the furniture consists of rust-blotted hunks of metal. There are opaque allusions to an insoluble ongoing crisis, but the catastrophe turns out to be human-sized: Jodie is dying and she demands the right to choose how and when.

Directed by Lisa Spirling, Neil LaBute’s intense 2017 three-hander premieres in the UK as the assisted dying bill winds through parliament. LaBute’s mixed feelings over his mother’s death in a US state with no such law inspired him to explore a more radical approach to relieving intolerable pain. Jodie and Brad’s visitor is Tate (Morgan Watkins), a brawny blue-collar ex-soldier whom Jodie has selected to be her mercy killer. What begins like a comedy of social awkwardness, with tense laughter about beverages and hors d’oeuvres, lurches unstoppably towards tragedy. The trio form a kind of love triangle, with death rather than sex (two of LaBute’s abiding themes) as the vector of infidelity. Can murder be a gift?

The play’s provocations are grounded in compassion. Kehinde gives Jodie a strained nobility with eruptions of agony that Brad’s love cannot relieve. Like one of Pinter’s mesmerising intruders, Watkins’s Tate is an agent of violent change. Coming off at first glance like a dust-blown refugee from Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, he is an unstable compound: strangely courtly one minute, twitching with menace the next, then solemnly respectful of the gravity of his task. It isn’t Backhouse’s fault that Brad’s case feels weaker because LaBute, despite his efforts to give every argument a fair hearing, is ultimately not on his side. His play is most moving and elemental when it looks death squarely in the eye. 

Photograph: Mark Douet