If you liked James Norton as a psychopath rapist in ‘Happy Valley’, you’ll love him as a self-mutilating conspiracist in ‘Bug’. Particularly the bit – and I’m more considering this a responsible warning than a spoiler – where he rips out one of his own teeth with a pair of pliers, probably about a metre or two from where you’re sitting.
If you didn’t know, FOUND111 is an intimate pop-up space in the old Saint Martin’s College. It’s basically a fringe theatre with bells on, and a key feature of Simon Evans’s twentieth anniversary production of Tracy Letts’s ‘Bug’ is that you are incredibly – sometimes excruciatingly – close to the action. Indeed, I had to look away for swathes of a second half that begins to feel increasingly like a nightmare, as the initially touching friendship between two lost souls – Kate Fleetwood’s crack-addled waitress Agnes and Norton’s initially sweet eccentric Peter – descends into claustrophobic horror.
Both leads are excellent: he’s a gentle oddball whose mounting paranoia never quite obstructs his humanity; she’s sharp, tough and heartbreakingly lonely. You really want it to work out for them, and it really really doesn’t, and there’s a horrible, remorseless logic to Letts’s portrait of their descent.
But I couldn’t quite get my head around the revival. We have two strong, sympathetic portraits of what some might call white trash, but what we’re supposed to take from their fate I’m not sure. In the programme notes Evans says this is a timely revival. I suppose he would say that, but I guess he means that these are exactly the sort of poor white folks whose disenfranchisement America is beginning to reap with the rise of Trump and Sanders. That doesn’t really come out in a play that still feels solidly of its time – not heinously dated, but certainly very ‘90s in its evocation of inward-looking, ‘X Files’-era America.
It has a lot to say about human vulnerability, especially before it goes full nightmare, but less to say about modern America’s problem with class and with drugs. And yes, it’s an intense, intimate experience, but that intensity also makes the production’s gruesomeness and body horror seem like the overriding point of the second half. It’s gripping, but it feels discomfortingly like a human zoo, a study of the American working class as violent, tragic exotica.