The Marked

Jack lives in a cracked world, homeless, sleeping in siren-filled streets after a shattered childhood. His is a world of demons lurking in people, of mothers ruined by alcohol. Hooded people lurk in corners and, at night, monsters emerge from overflowing dustbins and taloned creatures haunt his dreams.

Theatre Témoin and Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, have developed The Marked in consultation with Cardboard Citizens and other organisations dealing with homelessness. It’s a mix of live performance, puppetry and masks reminiscent of Teatro Delusio, currently also playing at the Pleasance Dome.

Director Ailin Conant’s beautifully realised production, with its slowed-down scenes, jarring sound effects of shattering glass and masked figures lurking behind barbed wire, has the feverishness of a nightmare. Zahra Mansouri’s versatile set turns a backstreet into a psychodrama. It’s the world inflected through Jack’s pain.

This show has much potency – visceral visual poetry about loss and hope and those overlooked or demonised by society (here, faces never turned to the audience). The cast, who also devised the piece, play their roles with an urgency that matches the heightened style. As Jack, Bradley Thompson is a conflicted innocent, clinging to certainties.

But there are times when style steals a lead over substance. Character transformations are slick and fluid, but overshadow the narrative. Beneath the vividly conjured atmosphere of horror, the show sometimes struggles to become more than high-impact imagery. Its vision of the darkness and the light in people glides over the surface of things, however powerfully it illuminates.