The Lost Boys meet Motherland in playwright John Donnelly’s giddily original stage return. It is a drama about postpartum depression and also vampirism that stars Sophie Melville as a stressed mum who turns to forces beyond mortal comprehension to sort out her mess of a life.
Running at a fleet one hour 40 minutes - which includes an interval! - Blanche McIntye’s production is a punchy affair that cheerily rips off a load of atmospheric stuff from classic horror movies (and there’s a clear homage to the bridge jumping scene from Joel Schumacher’s aforementioned The Lost Boys).
What it is mostly about, however, is motherhood. Mia (Melville) and Joe (Bryan Dick) have a primary school-aged son named Alfie who is probably neurodivergent or possibly just unusually sinister: he draws incredibly violent pictures, likes to wear a creepy mask, believs he has psychic powers, and has a habit of pointing at people in a truly terrifying manner. Moreover, Mia has just had a second child, Isla. Mia is struggling to run the home, to feed Isla, to deal with the thumping dance music emanating from the upstairs neighbours’ flat at all hours. Her affable partner Joe keeps them going financially but his weird hours and opaque police job don’t help Mia’s sense of stress, and when he is around he can’t help but put his foot in it by making his offers of help sound overly self-regarding.
Then she encounters Alfie’s new teacher Ana (Laura Whitmore, yes, the one from Love Island). She’s young (seemingly), fun and outspoken. Everything about her seems very conventional, until they go on a girls’ night out and Ana murders the guy whose house they go back to and drinks his blood, revealing herself to be a centuries-old vampire.
It is increasingly apparent that Mia is suffering from mounting postpartum psychosis. But has she also been turned into a vampire? Donnelly and McIntyre are wilfully ambiguous on this point, which is probably the cool and correct thing to do. But in sowing doubt over the play’s metaphysical side it does limit the amount we can learn about Ana as a person, which leaves the story a bit short on characterisation. Donnelly has written an audacious play, but it feels like it could have been deeper and braver. A lot of its components resemble a Greek tragedy, but they’re never put to properly devastating use.
What it very much has going for it is Sophie Melville - only rivalled by Patsy Ferran as the best actress of her generation. She lives Mia’s rage and fear so vividly that the question as to whether it’s ‘real’ seems broadly irrelevant when she’s on stage – it’s real to her.
Whitmore isn’t in Melville’s league, but she’s not bad – a bit ‘rooky actor trying to sound like a normal person’ early on, but once Ana’s secret is out she has a ball literally vamping it up. I’m sure years of being a minor celebrity haven’t exactly hurt her ability to play a magnetic undead glamour puss.
Apex Predator is an enjoyably outlandish way to tell a story about postpartum depression. It hints at being something bigger, at really embracing its genre trappings in a wider screen way, and it feels a shame it doesn’t go there – stuff like Ana fretting that climate change will deprive her of a food source or reminiscing about the Great Fire of London is tossed out but never explored. But if it doesn’t add up to a masterpiece it’s still pretty damn great, a serious story told in a wickedly entertaining way.
