Theatre

Viewed charitably, ‘The Wrong Sleep’ is an ambitious script that has a lot to work against in the Cock Tavern’s scantly resourced black box space.  But Mary Mazzilli’s text is also let down by Adam Morley’s prosaic direction and Nadia Shash’s dreadful central performance. Eventually the script unravels, too. The story of Janet – an immigrant Muslim convert to Catholicism who gradually reveals in a series of monologues and confessions to her priest that she has murdered her husband and children and bombed the town’s community centre – takes a lot of swallowing. It starts out spooky  and speculative, but ends up so overwrought and spelled-out that any wider points that the script might have been hoping to make get lost. Only the cast’s absolute commitment keeps the action watchable.