[title]
In our bright, busy, twenty-first-century lives, what scares us? What monsters still lurk in our wardrobes, waiting to pounce?
That’s the intriguing jumping off point for this company-devised piece from Engineer Theatre Collective. In the first half, two explorers, including PhD student Hana, enter a sink hole in search of ancient artefacts and find something dark and primal in themselves. And all the mod-cons in the world offer no defence against what Hana later brings home with her.
Thanks to some clever movement direction, Dominic Kennedy’s sound design and Oscar Wyatt’s lighting, less is definitely more here. Eerie echoes and a total blackout, apart from torch beams, light a fuse in our imaginations. There’s a visceral thrill to the show’s recreation of potholing into darkness. It leans heavily on horror film tropes.
But the production isn’t as strong at telling a compelling story. It soon loses momentum in a London-set second half that seems unsure of where to go next, after scaring us in our seats. Co-directors Jesse Fox and George Evans let the tautly wound tension of the cave scenes unravel into sameines. Ellie Isherwood brings a sense of trauma to Hana, but she’s hampered by a flat-footed script.
‘The Gap in The Light’ works best when it’s heart-thuddingly provoking our senses, but fares less well when it comes to digging a hole in our shiny veneer of rationality and exploring what lies beneath. Too many ideas are left hanging.