Although Sophie Swithinbank’s slippery thriller has nothing to do with that latter day lutenist, Sting and the Police would actually be a pretty apt name for her play. Starting as a kind of office odd couple comedy, Sting quickly brings in whispers of witchcraft, but then becomes a story of bent coppers in an inadequate justice system. Swirling all those elements together in her cauldron, Swithinbank creates a masterful, destabilising examination of domestic abuse that plays out like if A24 got their hands on an episode of Line of Duty.
She sets out exactly what the play is going to be about right from the beginning: Adelle Leonce’s Ash arrives – maybe still drunk from a heavy night out – at her new job in an archive dedicated to women killed as witches. Her archivist boss Lily helpfully explains the signs that would have got women accused: death of livestock, sexual activity, death of infants, seizures; she tells us that she is appalled by the similarities between a justice system built on misogyny then, and its echoes now.
And all of that is exactly what we get, especially when we meet Ash’s policeman partner Dom: a contemporary story of an abusive relationship, comparing now against then, and threaded through with those witchy signs and symbols.
Like if A24 got their hands on an episode of Line of Duty.
Adelle Leonce steals this with an unpindownable performance as Ash, full of oddness, her mood and intonation veering wildly from line to line, manic laughter one moment that recedes to childlike fear the next. It’s never clear if this wired and unpredictable woman is in control of her actions, and it’s all the more off-kilter against Phoebe Ladenburg’s calm and prim archivist Lily. Nick Blood, meanwhile, never overplays his malevolence as Dom. He and Ash are often close and clingy and loving, though that can evaporate in an instant.
Debbie Duru’s traverse set, bookended by two tall shelf stacks, turns from club dancefloor to office to third floor flat with just subtle shifts in lighting (Ryan Day), while superb sound design from Nicola T Chang – a radio flickering to life repeating the names of murdered women, subtle whooshes and threatening hums – adds that touch of otherworldliness, building up the stomach-knotting sense of dread that pervades the play. Huge amounts of haze help, too, playing again with that idea of real things that have taken on a magical touch: it’s steam from a shower, or smoke from a fire, but also creepy and magical and disorientating.
What Swithinbank does most spectacularly – helped by Nancy Medina’s brilliant direction, that keeps the actors cycling between physical closeness and distance – is recreate the atmosphere of bewilderment, mistrust and threat that Ash and others in abusive relationships must feel. So many lines can be interpreted as incredibly important and meaningful only to be dismissed by another character in the next moment as a misunderstanding or a triviality.
While Swithinbank never over-explains the snatches of witchcraft and magic and abandonment of realism, she does towards the end unnecessarily overstate the play’s themes. But it doesn’t really detract from a drama that manages to be several plays in one. It is a story of institutional misogyny in the police, a despairing portrait of an abusive relationship, a history of witchcraft, and an interrogation of how we can reconstruct the stories of murdered women when events and their chronicling are so often manipulated by men. It’s so rich with ideas, both funny and gripped by fierce rage, both slightly supernatural and sadly all too rooted in the real world.
