Apex Predator
Hampstead Theatre, London
★★

FOR more than 60 years, Hampstead Theatre has enjoyed a pivotal role. Bravely pioneering in spirit, it has periodically brought us world-class drama, thrilling new playwrights, great actors and eager audiences, while still retaining an atmosphere of local togetherness.

Lately, however, there have been some ups and downs. And, sadly, Apex Predator is a down.

Playwright John Donnelly has acclaimed stage and screen work to his name, and has no doubt been regarded as a catch by the Hampstead Theatre planning team. He has a purposeful agenda to this play and it premieres at Hampstead with all guns blazing. But the story is half-baked, as if jotted in bullet points on the back of a cigarette packet. 

Mia and Joe are parents to 11-year-old Alfie and baby Isla. Joe is distracted with undisclosed computer work and often away. Mia is an overstretched, exhausted mum. Alfie is exhibiting signs of disturbed behaviour at school. As for the baby: she never moves. Meanwhile, all trust and security in their greater world is damaged and nothing holds fast.  

While Donnelly’s created world fairly represents the shocking lack of trust that shapes our own contemporary life — from global warming to social media and international politics to local street crime — the evil in this play is personified through, yes, vampires. It’s hard to bring a new take on the modern world with such an old and hackneyed device. 

Alfie’s teacher, Ana, is a vampire; sucking blood from Mia and others and even suckling Mia’s baby. 

While it’s true that vampires never cease to fascinate, especially on screen when horror is the genre, they only terrorise when in conflict with “normal” people who reflect our own perspective. In this play, the characters are so un-nuanced as to be unreal, the plight of Mia and Joe too stereotypical to capture our imagination, and the vampire in Ana more conceptual than genuinely scary. So, there’s little point.

And, given that men are portrayed in the play as rampant, crazy dogs, the neighbours as music-blasting sociophobes and the children as inhabiting a universe of total moral vacuity, it’s all a free-for-all, and contrived to the point of silliness.   

Not that the cast don’t try. Bryan Dick, particularly expertly, suggests in Joe a man of hidden complexities. Both Sophie Melville as Mia and Laura Whitmore as Ana do what they can with characters that are little more than cyphers, and Callum Knowelden as Alfie delivers a forceful school presentation on climate change. 

Altogether, though, director Blanche McIntyre can’t do other with this play than bewilder and leave us cold. While occasional humour animates the audience, it often detracts from the more serious theme, as is evident in some of the arbitrary lines bestowed on actor Leander Deeny. And designer Tom Piper’s constantly moving beige panels and looming scaffolding can do little to focus the story or lay a style on the production. 

Neither real nor supernatural, this play feels like an early draft in the author’s head. 

A pity. 

Runs until April 26. Box office: (020) 7722-9301, www.hampsteadtheatre.com.