Theatre

Scary children are a massively popular source of horror. If you live in an area where the new movie ‘Orphan’ is being marketed, you’ve probably had a certain pigtailed changeling glaring out from your busshelter billboard for weeks.  But Dennis Kelly’s riveting new thriller ‘Orphans’ is a timely reminder that damaged kids are only really terrifying when they grow up.

Roxana Silbert’s nail-biting production opens with a shock. A well-dressed couple are sitting down to dinner (their bright interior is spliced with spiked iron gates in Garance Marneur’s ominous set). In their doorway stands a man who is covered in blood. The couple, Helen and Danny, are celebrating her second pregnancy and the gory man is Helen’s brother Liam. Kelly’s dialogue ebbs and flows in a horribly plausible way around the question that everyone wants to ask and no-one wants to hear the answer to: whose blood is Liam covered in and how did it get there?

Kelly’s play is deeply unsettling as it traces the way inwhich Helen and Danny become increasingly embroiled – and implicated – inLiam’s actions. What’s remarkable is the way in which the three lurch between normality and horror, love and terror, without ever losing touch with what theaudience believes to be reality. Plays which bring the psycho into the sittingroom can be viscerally effective. Kelly, like Sarah Kane, also brings terrorist executions, torture and war abroad into the theatre via a sitting room that the audience can all recognise - and via a character, Liam, whose history as a kid in care makes himan all-too familiar conduit for exotic violence. Claire-Louise Cordwell and Jonathan McGuiness are very good as the couple, gradually understanding the toxic effects of their own proximity to evil. But it’s Joe Armstrong as Liam who gives the stand out performance –  his vulnerability sustains your sympathy for him until, like the sister and brother-in-law who love him, you realise it’s too late.