Playwright Lars Norén is something of a legend in his native Sweden. He’s credited by some as an influence on the massively popular Scandi-noir crime fiction, a genre which is best known here for spawning TV shows like ‘The Killing’. But Norén’s work has had a lower profile in the UK.
The Print Room in Notting Hill is seeking to rectify that with this double bill of short plays, translated by Norén’s long-time collaborator, Marita Lindholm Gochman. In ‘Act’, a captured woman who may be a terrorist is questioned by a man who may be a doctor; in ‘Terminal 3’, two couples face the uncertainty and pain of life at its start and its end.
Norén is frequently described as the heir to fellow countryman August Strindberg, but it’s the fingerprints of writers like Harold Pinter that stand out here. Both of these plays heavily trade in the same queasy sprawl of mundane chat into something more odd-angled and unsettling.
But while ‘Act’ and ‘Terminal 3’ occasionally strike a twanging chord of genuine discomfort, Norén’s writing tends to get too hung up on ideas of mirroring and duality. The dissolving boundaries between characters is interesting, but, ultimately, neither play meaningfully evolves this beyond the initial conceit.
Director Anthony Neilson’s productions, while ominously atmospheric in some scenes, also tend to over-egg the pudding, whether that’s pumping the stage with weather-warning levels of special-effect smoke in ‘Terminal 3’ or, in ‘Act’, plonking a ‘Make America Great Again’ baseball cap on it. Referencing Trump is a satirical shortcut that already feels like a cliché.
That said, the casting of Temi Wilkey as ‘M’ – opposite a sweatily malevolent Barnaby Power – sharpens the references in ‘Act’ to the historic civil rights centre of Atlanta, Georgia. The racial subtext charges the play’s stronger moments. Wilkey, who also plays an apprehensive mother-to-be in ‘Terminal 3’, combines vulnerability and defiance.
Elsewhere, Robert Stocks brings some fine comic tuning to hapless, boorish new father ‘He’ in ‘Terminal 3’, while some of the other performances teeter on the edge of shouty.
This production’s strain to make an impact often belabours the writing at its heart. But while it may not be the best introduction to Norén’s work, it’s certainly an intriguing one.