Theatre

You can see why they opened this on Friday 13. Anthony Neilson’s new play (he also directs) returns to the shock-horror territory of his early ’90s drama ‘Normal: The Düsseldorf Ripper’. These days, it’s child-abusers, rather than Hannibal the Cannibal, who rampage through the popular imagination. And ‘Relocated’, which opens with a middle-aged woman vacuuming while the radio news blares, flicks chillingly through headline horrors in search of the one which has gripped her in a living nightmare.

What this play does most effectively is grab you by the pulse and keep you there, quaking, for every one of its 80 minutes. Being locked in a dungeon helps. The audience is on one side of a gauze wall in a black-painted, black-carpeted, windowless room (the implacable work of Miriam Buether). On the other side, the woman vacuums and vacuums until, with horrific suddenness, she collapses and the play begins. First, she has a weirdly dissociated confrontation with a man who has pornographic pictures of her she can’t remember having taken. She’s relocated to a different flat, where she’s haunted by lost children in a moonlit playground. What’s she on the run from? Where are the missing children? When the actress swaps roles with the younger actress playing her posh, nosy neighbour, the play asks which prison is worse: a dungeon, or an inescapably tainted identity?

Oblique memories alternate with dreams, in scenes which are increasingly scary and surreal, separated by nerve-wrackingly total blackouts. The woman’s identity seems to be, ultimately, a dialogue between Maxine Carr and the imprisoned daughter of Josef Fritzl. Neilson brilliantly creates a world where you expect these monsters to come out and play. But the topicality is also its weakness: in the cold light of day, the characters soon look like paper creatures, collaged from the red-tops.