'Darkling' review — Linnea Berthelsen makes a committed London stage debut in this catastrophic drama

Read our review of Titas Halder’s play Darkling, now in performances at the Bush Theatre to 24 October.

Environmental calamity gets filtered through the lens of an unnamed south Asian female in Darkling, Titas Halder’s unsparing solo play that here marks the London stage debut of Linnea Berthelsen. The Indian-born Danish actress is best-known for playing Kali Prasad on Netflix’s Stranger Things.

Traversing every corner on and around the raised platform of Simon Kenny’s set, Berthelsen pays witness to history of the most horrific kind. The setting is Bhopal, India, in 1984, where we get an immediate sense of the speaker’s family: an older sister and a shopkeeper father, the second of whom she deeply resents, and a hard-scrabble existence in mosquito-filled climes given over to clutter and chaos from the perspective of a house that is too small.

Soil encircling the set suggests something nurturing and soft to begin with only to morph into a landscape that is dry, parched, even “wasted” – a word that comes to resonate throughout. What ensues is the collision of this particular voice with the grievous aftereffects of the pesticide factory gas leak in Bhopal at the end of 1984 and a world turned in on itself where it hurts to breathe and contamination runs rife. (Some may be put in mind, as well, of 9/11 in New York, whose 25th anniversary was marked within days of this production’s opening.)

Breath – the very thing that gives us life – comes to prefigure the very real possibility of extinction as the “moonlight,” we’re told, “turn[s] our city shades of grey” and the speaker makes her way towards a living death. By the end of a play told in seven sections, she is “18 but ancient”, hopeless yet alert to renewed catastrophes of various kinds in which the prospect of rebirth is itself incinerated as the story moves towards its mercilessly grim conclusion.

A co-production with Actors Touring Company, this baleful merging of the personal and the political is elegantly shaped by the director Matthew Xia working with an ace design team who find a sulphurous fury as we glean more details about the devastation that has been wrought. (All credit to Rajiv Pattani’s prismatic lighting and a soundscape from Beth Duke that thrums with foreboding.)

At times, Halder’s writing evokes the granitic fury of T. S. Eliot in its incorporation of a surrounding world all but crushing the individual psyche, and we move seamlessly between the demotic and the demonic as straightforward storytelling sits alongside an unfolding apocalypse.

At the same time, I suspect I’m not the only one who began to wonder whether this sustained reportage might not work better as a short story we could digest for ourselves or as a blueprint for some sort of mixed-media stage version that might allow for more variety than the 90 minutes running time here allows. Whereas a narrated piece like Brian Friel’s Faith Healer throws the voice of the tale-teller into doubt, there’s very little of that here, and one misses the theatrical vibrancy that marked Run the Beast Down, an earlier solo work from Halder that was also a star vehicle for the excellent Ben Aldridge.

Berthelsen honours the material with a rigour that must be a real workout for her body, and she conveys the tenuous grip that this child-woman comes to hold over the grief and danger with which she is confronted at every turn. The play reminds us that the world at large can be a fearsome place without itself landing the knockout emotive punch that might send us furious and fretful out into the night.

Darkling is at the Bush Theatre to 24 October. Book Darkling tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Darkling (Photos by Alex Brenner)