Abyss

This thriller by German playwright Maria Milisavljevic is a slippery affair. Relaying the tale of a missing young woman and the three close friends who embark on a desperate search to find her, the play is like a puzzle. You have to carefully piece together snippets of the plot to work out what on earth is going on.

Milisavljevic’s writing is poetic and deliberately oblique. Her main character – named only as ‘I’ – lays out the plot for us, but she’s an unreliable narrator and embellishes the story with half-memories and strange visions. I, her sister Sofia and couple Karla and Vlado, are all housemates. But when Karla disappears and the police do nothing to help, their lives are changed instantly. They follow clues that lead them across their unnamed German city, to an encounter with a Russian babushka and a drunken man, before eventually they arrive at the river.

Croat and Serb trauma looms over the play. Vlado – a Serb – experiences violent flashbacks and finds his anger difficult to control. But it’s hard, in the end, to understand exactly why this is relevant to the main narrative. When Karla’s fate is revealed not to us, but only to Vlado – in the form of a letter he never reads – it’s all the more frustrating.

Still, despite the tricksy story, Milisavljevic has some beautiful turns of phrases, which are delivered very well by a poised cast. The three actors play several characters and Iain Batchelor is particularly good as the tormented Vlado. In InSite Perfomance’s pacy, physical show, Ziggy Jacobs-Wybun’s lighting design is gorgeous – a curtain of pulsing bright bulbs hangs at the back of the stage bathing the stage in an intense, atmospheric light.

It’s a pity Milisavljevic was so intent on making ‘Abyss’ enigmatic. As a result, in its final denouement where we should be unable to stop watching, we’re left scratching our heads.