Animals

There’s a cauldron of good ideas simmering in the middle of ‘Animals’, Emma Adams’ new play for Theatre 503. She’s written a kind of reverse fairy-tale, told from the point of view of the witches three. The play is set in a future England where people cease to be useful after a certain age and can be euthanised by a Utility Inspector if they can’t produce the proper paperwork. Norma is in her seventies but has been pretending to be 37. Her world of comfy chairs and crossword puzzles is disrupted by the arrival of Milly Thomas’s Maya, a cosseted innocent about to hit a milestone birthday.

Adams has created a very topical dystopia where the young quite literally wear bubble-wrap jackets and can’t cross the road without adult accompaniment, while the old live in fear of deletion and keep emergency stashes of amphetamines in their kitchen cupboards.  She has been vocal about the need for older female actors to be better represented on our stages and in Marlene Sidaway, as Norma, and Cara Chase and Sadie Shimmin as her aged neighbours, Helen and Joy, she has a more than capable cast. Designer Max Dorey does excellent things with rust, rot and decay,creating a crumbling world for the characters to inhabit.

But Lisa Cagnacci’s production is a tonal muddle. Adams clearly has a lot to say about the invisibility of older women, the witching of them in our society, the way they cease to be of value, and there’s a lot of anger and humour in the way she plays with that idea, but the satire can be blunt as a truncheon and the pitching of the play is awkward. It veers between something darker and more informed by the tropes of horror, and something more broadly comic, without ever finding a happy balance.