Photo by Brett Boardman
David awakes alone in a locked room. He has no memory of how he got there. He has no memory of the past week. Enter Alice, the mysterious health professional. ‘You’re safe, David,’ she tells him repeatedly, and in the mere act of saying this, she implies danger is present. As the details of David’s condition unravel, he and Alice play a game of cat and mouse, treading the line between captor/captive, victim/perpetrator, and puppet/puppet master.
Director Kim Hardwick has taken Aiden Fennessy’s sparse play and made it sparser. It’s an elegant and artful approach whereby all production elements are tastefully restrained so that they operate on an almost subconscious level. Kelly Ryall’s sound design, Stephen Curtis’ production design and Martin Kinnane’s lighting design all blend into a seamless tapestry enveloping, but never dominating, a play that is essentially a performance and dialogue showcase. To use the word ‘invisible’ has negative connotations, but it’s refreshing to see a direction that is both strong and transparent, in a world where directors often try to force a style or statement on their work. Hardwick’s director’s note is actually a refusal to give a directors note, which often reads as a cryptic cowardice, but in this case is completely justified.
Huw Higginson and Jeanette Cronin are sublime as David and Alice respectively. Central to the success of this play are the dynamics between the two players. As they walk the tightrope between protagonist and antagonist, the audience is well and truly manipulated as to where our empathies lie. It’s so much fun it’s criminal. It’s a credit to the writing that Higginson has a great deal to play with in his character – the arrogant lawyer who ironically finds himself held hostage by the legal system he represents. Cronin utilizes just enough warmth to smart, sterile Alice to make us constantly second-guess her agenda. She had some projection issues on the night this reviewer attended, as she was struggling through a cold, and was often placed with her back to the audience, but that didn’t take away from the enjoyability of her performance.
This is tight writing that knows how to walk the line of tension. It is peppered with self-aware homages to the beauty of language, as Fenessey has great fun creating palindromes and acronyms with the characters’ names – is this an insight into character or is it another red herring? This is clearly a writer’s writer. To pick holes, structurally, perhaps it unraveled a little too quickly at the end, but that’s a testament to how enjoyable the slow burn is in the top half.
Crime thrillers are a somewhat outdated genre in a time of extremely savvy viewers. It’s a big feat to win over an audience who knows they are going to be manipulated whilst at the same time not insult their intelligence. Yet, when successfully executed, the perverse pleasure of being tricked is quite the ride. This House on the Lake in no way re-invents the wheel nor does it break new ground; it is simply a sublime execution of a faithful formula.
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
The House on the Lake
By Aidan Fennessy
Director: Kim Hardwick
Designer: Stephen Curtis
Lighting Designer: Martin Kinnane
Composer: Kelly Ryall
Stage Manager: Edwina Guinness
With Jeanette Cronin, Huw Higginson
SBW Stables Theatre, Kings Cross
22 May – 20 June
