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People who in live in cities have different relationships with foxes to those who don’t. We see them more often. We’re less fazed when we walk past them at night. And who hasn’t been kept up by the sound of them at night? Titas Halder’s bizarre one-man, one-act debut takes the nocturnal screeching of urban foxes as its central motif.
Charlie (Ben Aldridge) is your run-of-the-mill, twentysomething Londoner chump who’s having a run of bad luck. He’s bullied by his odious wanker-banker colleagues, is then fired by his bosses, only for his girlfriend to walk out on him. And thanks to foxes, he can’t sleep. Like a protagonist in a Thomas Pynchon novel – on the hunt for little except proof of his own sanity – he’s led on a hallucinatory trail from dismembered cats to living statues to council estate residents to a malignant, sentient, talking fox.
Hannah Price’s production is stripped back and full of postmodern styling: Charlie scrawls each ‘chapter’ title across the floor, while musician Chris Bartholomew delivers his feverish soundscape live at the back. It’s Aldridge, naturally, who holds it all together with a multi-stringed performance that encompasses paranoid rambling to the ungodly screeching of his vulpine nemesis.
It’s a compelling meditation on class, masculinity and self-worth, and if it doesn’t come together to anything that, well, makes any bloody sense, then it’s all the braver for it. A bit of pruning wouldn’t have gone amiss: 90 unbroken minutes of this stuff is a bit of a slog. But this has thrown Halder into the scene as someone with tremendous promise. Keep an eye out for his follow-up, ‘Escape the Scaffold’ – it’s due later this year.