★★★★☆
Dead babies, warped desires, casual cruelty: this savage, slippery, elegant drama by the Québécois playwright Catherine-Anne Toupin is as precise as a surgical incision yet as raw as an open wound. Translated by Chris Campbell and directed with unnerving intensity by Michael Boyd, it’s an intimate study of grief and loss, a portrait of bourgeois domesticity grotesquely distorted by pain. Nothing is as it seems and the ever-altering perspective acutely evokes a mind in terrifying freefall.
Alice (Lindsey Campbell) and her doctor husband Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) have recently moved into a smart apartment. Yet between its tastefully decorated walls, Alice is a tormented prisoner, haunted by the wails of the infant that the young couple have apparently lost to cot death. Into this unhappy ménage barge their neighbours, the Gauches: middle-aged Juliette (Maureen Beattie) and Gilles (Guy Williams) and their adult but infantile son François (Dyfan Dwyfor).
Juliette and Gilles are both alarmingly lascivious, though they make no secret of the fact that they’ve lost interest in one another. So while Juliette forces Ben into a creepy erotic game where he must crawl between her thighs to glimpse the colour of her lingerie, Gilles seduces Alice in the kitchen. François, treated with undisguised contempt by his parents, resorts to turning cartwheels and ripping the flat apart in a desperate bid for attention.
There’s a flavour of Harold Pinter, particularly of Old Times, as Toupin, whose play draws on her own family tragedy, leads us through a maze of conflicting narratives in which power continually shifts and roles intersect. We are told that François had a brother who died in childhood and that Ben was orphaned while young; and we watch as familial relationships are horribly contorted and subverted. Even the cause of Alice’s trauma is uncertain: a final, shocking twist undercuts every assumption we’ve made.
The nimble cast inhabits each moment with conviction, and if the piece’s tricksiness sometimes makes it feel a little airless, it also reinforces our sense of Alice’s claustrophobic panic. Deftly discomfiting.
Box office: 01225 448844, to March 19; then Bush Theatre, London W12, March 23 to April 16; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, April 19 to May 7