Children and Animals

It's unfair to compare the work of a talented rising star to one of the modernist era's greats, but this new piece from writer Florence Read is plainly indebted to Edward Albee – Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in particular.

Like her forbear, Read presents the audience with a dysfunctional couple whose relationship is marked by alternately tender and aggressive game playing. The arrival of a third party makes for some discomforting realisations, an external sense of truth and reality ultimately piercing the pair's coping strategies.

While Albee uncovered the dissatisfaction lurking beneath the surface of respectable early 1960s American society, Read seems more concerned with the corrosive effects of normality. Her highly strung protagonists never appear quite sure how to behave, even when dealing with an open-minded and understanding sex worker. As their demands take an apparently dark turn, it becomes clear both long for an irretrievable sense of peace, to escape from horrors at once rare and everyday.

Emma D'Arcy shines here, her childlike behaviour juxtaposed with deadpan, distinctly middle-class airs. As May the prostitute, Gráinne O'Mahony is suitably enigmatic and adaptable. Nicholas Finerty proves something of a weak link, though through no fault of his own – he's simply too outwardly boyish to convince in the role of a broken, potentially unsavoury grown-up. A lot of his comic dialogue, meanwhile, smacks of the kind of forced awkwardness better suited to weak sitcoms than bold, original theatre.