In Steph Smith’s Royal Court debut, nature is revolting and it feels somewhat like a modern day Hitchcock crisis. Reminiscent of The Birds, a pigeon splattering through a living-room window opens the show, and from here, these incidents worsen. 90 birds flock over a garden decking, foxes are dropping dead and mice are eating themselves. Disease infects the animals and fear infects the people, whilst each of the six interconnected characters reacts in a different way.Young couple Lisa (Lisa McGrillis) and Jamie’s relationship becomes strained, as Jamie (Ashley Zhangazha) quits his job and starts breeding healthy animals in their garden. Widowed mother Nancy (Stella Gonet) takes to drinking with defiant neighbour John (Ian Gelder), and Nancy’s daughter Alex (Natalie Dew), recently back from travelling, protests against the burning down of the local park. Meanwhile corporation man Si (Sargon Yelda) stays cool and collected, and leads the extermination of the animals, burning down their habitats and punishing anyone who protects them.
Smith explores a lot of issues in this seventy-five minute piece, but to the extent that it feels crammed and muddled. It could be about ecology, or is more about anti-austerity, and damning how the powers that be behave in a crisis? It also explores human nature, how quickly we allow the extraordinary to become ordinary and the extremes we will go to in order to protect our nearest and dearest. But none of these valuable ideas develop enough, which makes Smith’s play less hard-hitting, but perhaps more lingering, which could be a strength rather than a weakness. The audience is certainly left with plenty of niggling thoughts and questions about the world we live in.
Considering director Hamish Pirie’s production’s promising Hitchcock saga start, the play never quite follows it through to a heightened level of uneasiness, but the potential is most certainly there, and it would be interesting to see how this grows during the run. There are chorus sections throughout the play, and for me this is where the tension is broken. The ensemble is not well enough established yet and though poetic, the writing is slightly vague and its necessity to the play unclear.
Where Pirie hastruly excelled is in drawing out Smith’s cheeky, dark humour, and Sargon Yelda as Si performs this element particularly well. The play is at its most engaging during the more natural and human moments, particularly in Natalie Dew’s scenes, who brings a stunning warmth and depth to the role of Alex.
Human Animals, despite its murkiness, leaves you with a question indicated in the title, where is the line between human and animal behaviour? In a world where establishments are so quick to exterminate the source of any threat in fight for survival, from epidemics to genetic cleansing, how animalistic are we? Enforced beautifully by Camilla Clarke’s insect enclosure style box set, with ventilation grates on either side and backed by a glass window that is slowly splattered with more and more nationalistic white and red paint, the line between who the animals really are begins to blur.
Until June 18. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com
About thirty minutes into this I was wondering when the story was going to start, then I realised that something very clever indeed was going on - through a series of pastiches of 1970's comedy we were learning about the psyche of our central character, Screaming Lord Such.