Joe
Penhall has the gift, valuable to a writer, of leaving holes invisible
to the naked eye. For a taut, seamless literary or dramatic fabric is
not necessarily best; more potent can be a work which at first appears
linear and specific enough, but turns out to furnish a wealth of gaps
through which diverse interpretations and resonances can find their way.
On
the surface, the title character in Penhall’s new play is young Thomas,
a diffident lad, bullied at school, whose fears and worries are fed by
noises he hears at night, and most of all by his father’s disappearance
and then reappearance and the subsequent tensions evident between his
parents, with unsettling behaviour on both sides. How can a child hope
to understand such very adult complications? Yet the haunted child
could also be Thomas’s mother Julie, living first with the memory of
her vanished husband and then tormented by the chasm between those
recollections and the husband-shaped creature that has returned to her,
spouting frightening yet sometimes seductive otherworldly gibberish. It
could even be the revenant Douglas, haunted simultaneously by the
desires of his past life with Julie and Thomas and by the tenets and
requirements of his new “spiritual” path, a mixture of vaguely Buddhist
cliché and a claptrap pastiche of Scientology.
It
is scarcely less difficult, Penhall, implies, making sense of the world
as an adult than as a child. The allure of a supernatural
interpretation can be strong, as can that of fervent faith in an
instructing authority: in a line that comes out the blue, Julie
questions the strength of Douglas’s belief in his new leader by asking,
“Would you blow yourself up on the tube if he told you to?”
Ben
Daniels is terrific as Douglas, trying to sound reasonable at all
times, quite devoid of the happy-zombie stare of the cult devotee yet
still seeming not quite in focus with his surroundings. Sophie
Okonedo’s Julie begins as a moderately stressed effectively-single
mother and frays convincingly from that point. Penhall’s writing is not
ostentatious in its absence of answers, but rather it discreetly poses
a clutch of questions and, as I say, leaves the kind of holes that
strengthen the play rather than weakening it, allowing us to peer into
it and through it from a variety of angles.
Written for the Financial
Times.