Theatre

Frantic Assembly’s ‘Stockholm’ is about personal matters, and one’s reactions to it will be personal too. I, for example, found its characters unlikeable from the outset. Lovers Kali and Todd are a chic, smug and sexy urban couple whose whole life looks like a Häagen-Dazs advert. The idea may be to contrast outward perfection with inner turmoil. But the effect was, on this viewer, alienating. Likewise, their relationship – which flits between consuming passion and rampant fury – fits my definition of hell on earth. In short: I’d rather batter myself around the head with a coffee-table edition of ‘The Joy of Sex’ than go out with either of these people.

But I won’t be the only onlooker in whom ‘Stockholm’ engenders strong reactions. My discomfort may be (in some ways) a tribute to its claustrophobic power. Bryony Lavery’s depiction of this fatal cycle of love and lust, jealousy and resentment is psychologically acute and painfully recognisable. ‘I’m too intelligent for this. This makes us stupid,’ says Todd, as the niggling and neuroses snowball towards violence. The more ardent the love, the more frustrating the sense that, finally, we can never get inside one another’s heads.

A sleek design by Laura Hopkins, of a kitchen with a surfeit of knives, provides the backdrop to this proto-‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ mayhem. The tenderness and torment find fluid expression in movement sequences by directors Steven Hoggett and Scott Graham, one of which sees the lovers set to slice one another up like sides of beef. This is love as mutual hunger and butchery. Stockholm syndrome is the bond that forms between hostage and abductor. ‘Stockholm’ makes us witness to that bond – but it couldn’t make me understand it. I just longed for one party or another to escape.