'Apex Predator' review — new thriller play is out for blood

Read our review of Apex Predator, now at the Hampstead Theatre to 26 April.

They’re on the lookout for blood in Apex Predator, which has nothing to do with the song of the same name from the Mean Girls musical and everything to do with this third collaboration between playwright John Donnelly and director Blanche McIntyre.

It’s impossible not to immediately reveal vampirology as the topic, here refracted through a narrative that suggests Rosemary’s Baby crossed with the much-travelled 2:22 A Ghost Story. That Danny Robins thriller boasted TV personality Laura Whitmore in one of its many casts, and she co-stars once again: a naturally likable performer amidst some decidedly unnatural goings-on.

How else to explain the tendency of the play's 11-year-old Alfie to march into view and point a threatening finger for reasons best known to himself? The same (masked) lad is also reported to have bitten a classmate, a detail that comes home to roost when more than one adult in his midst turn out to be similarly inclined.

The first half of a short evening — 105 minutes including an interval — rips along, carried by the vigour of an impressive cast and highly atmospheric staging from McIntyre. She trades in the classical bent of her previous Hampstead offering, the brilliant The Invention of Love, for thriller-inflected dynamics that make ample use of Jack Knowles’s lighting (he won an Olivier last year for Sunset Boulevard) and Christopher Shutt’s sound design.

Tom Piper’s set surrounds the playing area with scaffolding, as if to hint at a precarity that does decisively come into play. But for the play’s first third, at least, we seem largely to be shadowing the fretful, anxious musings of Alfie’s mum, Mia (a characteristically sparky Sophie Melville). All nervy intensity, Mia does battle with noisemakers on a train and, once back home, with a clueless upstairs neighbour uninterested in the presence of her 5-month-old child, Isla, whom Mia all but carries about like a human shield.

The sort who expects the worse to happen so it in fact will, Mia falls under the sway of Alfie’s primary school teacher, Ana (Whitmore), whose apparently placid demeanour is anything but. All this comes fringed with ominous reports from the front line of a forbidding future — “Mother Earth is angry and she will have her revenge” — and by the employment of Mia’s partner, Joe (an engaging Bryan Dick), in the shadowy realm of IT. Let’s just say he, too, knows a thing or two about the undead.

The result suggests multiple stories waiting to take wing, and there’s the feeling after the interval that Donnelly hasn’t quite settled on the tale he most wants to tell. This is that rare play which might be better if it were longer; too often, dramatic ellipsis substitutes for enlightenment.

Is it possible to be unafraid amidst a world that threatens to devour us whole, well before we may decide to follow that precise course ourselves? (Cannibalism, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, makes an all-but-inevitable appearance.) A passing reference to Dungeons and Dragons nods in the direction of The Habits, the Jack Bradfield play nearing the end of its run at the Hampstead’s studio theatre downstairs at the same address. But Apex Predator is darker and altogether more disturbing. With further, ahem, fleshing out, it could well make the flesh truly crawl.

Apex Predator is at the Hampstead Theatre to 26 April. Book Apex Predator tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: Apex Predator (Photos by Ellie Kurttz)