Apartment blocks can make convenient backdrops for noirish thrillers with dangerous romances and shady neighbours. In Shaun McKenna’s play, Zoe (Kirsten Foster) moves into a block of flats where Danny (Tyger Drew-Honey) is the caretaker. His room suggests a repressed personality – bare but for a few pieces of furniture and a strangely creepy butterfly chrysalis that he nurtures. Hers reveals subterfuge – there is a stand for the blonde wig she wears.
Artfully directed by Steven Kunis, Rocky Road was broadcast live from Jermyn Street theatre last week and is a fine example of onscreen theatre wrought with the suspense of live drama and employing the aesthetics of film. Ryan Joseph Stafford’s lugubrious lighting creates an almost black-and-white effect with its shadows and squares of light, while the set is ingeniously designed by Ceci Calf to function as both of their rooms with a door at either end. The camera narrows into each character’s space, to create a sense of solitude.
Neither Zoe nor Dan are who they say they are, which is no big surprise: her wig looks conspicuous from the start, and he is overtly oddballish, screaming at the walls and looking like one of Edward Hopper’s lonely souls at his kitchen table. But they summon an air of duplicity and reel us into the drama: there is a glassy, hard edge to her cheerfulness; he is taciturn, secretly self-harming and curled in on himself but with a hint of threat.
The violent story gets darker by turns, the sense of a cat-and-mouse game gathers high stakes and the tension is raised mercilessly. Dan Samson’s sound design builds suspense and sounds like the swish of heavy waters concealing monstrosities that lurk beneath.
The edge-of-the-seat effect is also down to the tautness of McKenna’s script, with its blend of revelation and withholding, and the intense and nuanced performances from Drew-Honey and Foster. Her queasy mix of fear and fury is palpable as she reels him in but so is his raised hope that the universe is offering him something wholesome, at last.
There are shades of other influences, alongside film noir, most notably Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (is the title a kind of homage?) but the register here is less psychological than that film and more thrillingly baroque.
Ultimately, it explores the traumatic ripples of both crime and punishment, and the difference between retributive and restorative justice. Zoe wants an explanation for Danny’s unexplained crime but that reasonable motivation morphs into unquenchable, obsessive, bloodthirsty revenge that contains its own criminal intent.
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