This nailbitingly tense thriller is director Felix Barrett’s second ‘normal’ piece of theatre to open in London in the last year, following West End smash Paranormal Activity.
If you don’t know the name, Barrett is the founder and driving force behind brooding immersive theatre legends Punchdrunk. But his straight plays aren’t so much a case of him moonlighting as a normie director as a fascinating extension of the day job. Yes, The Guilty is fairly straightforward as a text. Concerning a troubled police call centre operator, it’s writer Chloe Moss’s adaptation of the Danish film Den Skyldige and its Jake Gyllenhaal-starring Hollywood remake. You could probably have a fairly good time taking a version to the Edinburgh Fringe.
But at the risk of throwing around an entirely debased term, this production is about as immersive as sitting in a seat watching a single guy onstage gets. The action is enhanced by an arsenal of disorienting light and sound tricks, some of which you might recognise from Punchdrunk shows (most notably the thunderous deployment of Massive Attack’s ‘Angel’ at the start, also recently used in Punchdrunk’s Viola’s Room). Gareth Fry, the sound designer for Viola’s Room and Complicité’s landmark The Encounter is back on board, as is much of the rest of the Paranormal Activity creative team. Subtle shifts in light and the crackly strangeness of the calls he receives take on a feverish, nocturnal quality, only growing stranger as the show wears on.
The single guy is important, admittedly. Russell Tovey wears his heart on his sleeve tremendously well as Joe, a jaded police call centre operator going about his job with surly efficiency: wearily directing a woman standing near a crashed car that’s leaking petrol to stand away from it; only pretending to call help for a panicked man who has obviously been robbed by a prostitute; passive aggressively asking a woman ringing to complain about a loud house party if she actually has an emergency.
There are hints from the beginning that something bad has happened to Tovey’s operator – that Joe has been put on desk duty that he obviously resents because of something he’s done. And when he has a surreptitious phone call with his daughter, it’s apparent it’s impacted his family life too.
Then, at last, there comes a call he’s interested in: a woman has been abducted, and has called 999 under the guise of ringing her daughter. Suddenly, he’s engaged – calling in favours from pals and trying to give orders to the nonplussed response team.
There are some intriguing Beckettian flourishes here – does it mean anything when one of the neon lighting strips flickers in the curious room Joe is apparently working alone in? Can he actually leave the room? Why are so many of the computers in Alex Eales’ set covered in dust shrouds? Is the late reveal of the source of all the phone voices just a nice, weird way of offering credit to a performer, or a sign that something more metaphysical is going on?
Barrett’s direction provides an alluring air of ambiguity, but at the same time it’s mostly a bloody good real-time thriller. Running to just an hour, some of the plot twists are a touch melodramatic, but they have a rollercoaster momentum that means there’s no pause to be cynical, as Tovey’s character makes one fateful decision after the other, in the moment.
