Apex Predator review: ‘this supernatural psychodrama just about works’ - The Jewish Chronicle

Sometimes it helps to see how – or if – a play settles in the mind before dashing off a review. While watching John Donnelly’s hybrid work which combines the supernatural with urban social realism, the combination of the two seemed so ridiculous I teetered on the response that all forms of art dread most – unintentional laughter. The evening begins seriously enough.

For Mia (Sophie Melville) 21st century London is a fearful place. Random strange men threaten her as she goes about her daily life. She is too scared to complain to the neighbour in the flat above hers who plays rave beats at full volume, keeping her newborn baby awake and adding to a post-natal sense of desperation.

She is too scared to complain to the neighbour in the flat above hers who plays rave beats at full volume, keeping her newborn baby awake and adding to a post-natal sense of desperation

Her troubled 11-year-old son Alfie goes around with a home-made mask that would spook Frankenstein’s monster. The disturbing art he makes at school seems to reflect an underlying anxiety about violence. His teacher Ana (Laura Whitmore) thinks the images are related to his IT specialist dad Joe (Bryan Dick) who works nights monitoring encrypted chat room for the police who are investigating a series of gruesome murders. Bodies have been decapitated and drained of blood. Could a cult of wannabe vampires be responsible?

That men make women live in fear is always a point worth making. Leander Deeny gets to play them all: the suit-wearing meathead on the tube who violently threatens to knock Mia and her baby to the ground; the man in the park whose friendly banter turns into sexual assault or the guy upstairs off his head and refusing to turn down the music.

Sophie Melville as Mia and Laura Whitmore as Ana[Missing Credit]

Yet if this were solely a play about toxic masculinity such well worn observations would never cut the mustard. It doesn’t help that Tom Piper’s design using translucent screens is more kabuki theatre than 21st century London. Similarly if this were exclusively a play about the supernatural it would be thinly drawn horror.

But credit where it’s due. The moment when social realism and the supernatural collide is genuinely startling. It sticks in the mind for much longer than the mediocre lead-up. So to does the horror-infused climax. Both make this play worth sticking with. But only just.

Hampstead Theatre

★★★

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Theatre