Pomona

A year ago, Alistair McDowall’s ‘Pomona’ – an extraordinary cocktail of brutal thriller, sweary magical realism and HP Lovecraft references – almost single-handedly turned around the reputation of Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre; reanimating the critically moribund venue like a necromantic rite.

This very deserved transfer may have fractionally damped the play’s mystique given that it’s programmed among other audacious productions at the NT where it’s attracted an appreciative younger audience – at the Orange Tree you felt a weird frisson from the fact that theatre’s older regulars were genuinely horrified by it. But ‘Pomona’ remains extraordinary and virtuosic nonetheless, if slightly reworked for extra polish and energy.

It begins incongruously, with Guy Rhys’s otherworldly Mancunian property magnate Zeppo giving a hilariously rambling description of the climactic scene of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. It seems like McDowall is simply having a laugh… but could this be the key to the whole play? Zeppo offers it as an allegory for why some things should be left alone:  something his audience, a girl named Ollie (Nadia Clifford), hunting her missing twin sister, is determined not to heed. Zeppo reluctantly tells her that people have been snatched and taken to Pomona, a deserted island in the middle of Manchester’s canals.

What happens next is entirely gripping, if in no way clear or linear. In Ned Bennett’s stark, stylish production we see ‘flashbacks’ to Ollie’s sister being shown the ropes at a brothel by Rebecca Humphries’s good-hearted Fay; we are introduced to Sarah Middleton’s diminutive Keaton, a pale young girl fascinated by tales of HP Lovecraft’s godlike monsters told to her by Sam Swann’s eccentric, jizz-obsessed security guard Charlie during their weekly game of Dungeons and Dragons; we see Charlie and his colleague Moe guarding the entrance to Pomona, where something goes terribly wrong.

So many questions are never answered – does Ollie really have a sister, and if so why is she never named? Who or what is Keaton? Can we believe in the horror Ollie finds under Pomona? Above all: in what order are these events taking place? We never find out, and yet ‘Pomona’ has its own momentum: the longer it goes on for, the darker it gets, and it’s almost a relief that we’re afforded so much ambiguity to hide behind. I think ultimately it's a story about stories, underpinned by one, ominous line: ‘everything bad is real’.