FERDINAND Wögerbauer has certainly designed an ugly, offputting set for David Harrower’s Blackbird. On and around a plastic table, plastic chairs and ugly dark-green lockers are piles of old bottles, cans, paper plates, sandwich wrappers, crisp packets, bits of half-eaten food. The passers-by who peer in — and plenty are seen taking a dekko through the frosted glass at the back — would think Fungus the Bogeyman had been sharing a picnic with Roald Dahl’s ultra-foul Twits.
They’d be more or less right, too, for the set is as symbolic as sets get. Fifteen years ago Roger Allam’s Ray, who is now 56, was imprisoned for having sex with Jodhi May’s Una, who was then 12. He’s changed his name, taken a job in a dental goods factory, modestly prospered. And now here’s his one-time victim, appearing from nowhere to rake up a past as messy as this recreation room.
Harrower got the idea after reading of the US Marine Toby Studebaker, who not long ago befriended a 12-year-old English girl on the internet, absconded with her to the Continent, and was arrested.
His rejigging of the case was staged by the great German director Peter Stein at last year’s Edinburgh Festival — where it got reviews so enthusiastic that a London transfer became inevitable.
That’s as it should be, too, though in some ways Harrower’s treatment of what’s now a well-trodden subject is predictable. Una rages, taunts Ray, accuses him of having ruined her life. Ray is defensive, self-pitying, insistent he’s no paedophile. And, yes, maybe the overage loner did love the underage loner and, as he now claims, became unwillingly obsessed with her. Certainly she loved him and, as she now admits, did what she could to capture him. But did that allow an adult to make a pre-pubescent girl his mistress? Of course not. Harrower clearly does not think so; yet his play’s eventual achievement is to suggest that such a case isn’t as straightforward as tabloid hysteria usually proclaims. There’s a destructive symbiosis at work here: one that doesn’t only lead to a graphic, gripping description of the principals’ elopement and parting but a strange and terrible ending, not unlike the denouement of Sam Shepard’s incest play Fool for Love . Both principals are stuck in a time-warp where damage, guilt and passion co-exist.
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But if the play sets you thinking, it’s because of performances packed with feeling: May, sexually alert and teasing behind the rancorous fury; Allam, hurt, indignant yet crumpled, bowed, as if transforming himself into a tortoise complete with shell. They’re both terrific.
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