THE WRONG SLEEP                 COCK TAVERN THEATRE

The Cock Tavern Theatre, Kilburn, under the artistic direction of Adam Speadbury –Maher continues with The Wrong Sleep, to offer some of London’s finest and most innovative fringe work.

Ruthsdale, a desolate town is rocked by an explosion that leaves many dead and injured. A priest offers the community God as comfort, despite beginning to doubt his own faith, and a deeply disturbed Muslim woman suffering from extreme insomnia, comes to him seeking answers. She is torn between Islam, Christianity and secularism, and as it becomes increasingly clear that she is willing to use violence to vent her frustrations, she also uses the place to confess. She is unashamed of her actions both past and present. Currently she seems to be talking to her dead lover wrapped in a sleeping bag that shares her bed, and also admits she is the enemy within, having caused the bomb blast. In the past she claims to have murdered her three children and stuffed them into flowerpots.

With this surrealistic play produced by visiting company Lumenis, it is never certain what is real, or what is created as part of a manic awake dreamscape devised by Janet’s long term sleep deprivation. Writer Mary Mazzilli, seems to be heavily influenced by Martin Crimp’s Attempts On Her Life, and the absurdist theatre of Ionesco, and this structurally fragmented script seems be an ‘open text’ which offers little resolution. Janet could be crazy as a loon, a victim of psychosis due to long term insomnia who is not sanely responsible for her actions, but she could just as easily be a monster who just enjoys killing. It is left to the audience to decide on this and other matters. As with much surreal theatre the story is polymorphous, and is sometimes hard to see where it is going, but it is held together by Adam Morley’s tight direction, and compelling performances by the actors.

Nadia Shash is highly watchable as Janet, who seems to respond instinctively to the dramatic twists and turns of her character, and David McCelland is excellent as the persecuted priest.

Mazzilli’s intense, poetic language flits between themes of sex and incest, imperialism and terrorism, compassion and retribution. It challenges and touches the audience, and despite striving to be a little too intellectually abstract at times, manages to engage from beginning to end. 

If you want to see theatre that breaks away from the bog-standard commercial norm this is the show to see.