Bug

Every now and then a particular theatre turns into a breeding ground. It becomes indispensable. Which is the case with Emily Dobbs’s Found111. It is not only that this unlikely theatrical space, at the top of several punitive flights of stairs next to Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, has been terrifically well programmed with ferocious plays: Barrie Keeffe’s Barbarians and Richard Greenberg’s The Dazzle. It is also that its productions have been detailed and unsparing. The physical conditions – the low ceiling, the cramped room where the audience almost spill on to the stage – mean that the space itself becomes a magnifying glass for actors. The best of them shine.

As do Kate Fleetwood and James Norton in Simon Evans’s production of Bug. Seeing Tracy Letts’s 1996 paranoia play here is like watching a disaster unfold in a shaving mirror. Agnes (Fleetwood), in mourning for a child that has vanished, high on coke and liquor, in fear of her battering ex-con husband, takes a Gulf war veteran, Peter (Norton), into her motel room. For a moment hope twinkles. But the bug starts here.

There is, it seems, an aphid in the bed – or a surveillance system implanted in Peter’s skin. Misery turns to horror, enclosed in the unnerving crackle of Ed Lewis’s soundscape. Huge red sores like infected tattoos; a bloodied nose; pliers meeting teeth. Norton – he of War and Peace and Happy Valley – slinks like a lashed dog. He looks utterly flayed, but is himself an infection.

Fleetwood is one of the few actors who can suggest impoverishment, of means and mettle, without flashing it like a cloak. She draws on the quality she showed in the film of London Road: magnetic despair.

Author: Susannah Clapp

Tracy Letts's play certainly isn’t for the squeamish. There’s a moment in the second half when James Norton’s character, a drifter called Peter, tries to yank out one of his own teeth with a pair of pliers. By this time he’s already covered in sores and scratches, and his crude attempts at oral surgery induce gasps of horror. 

Fans may spot similarities between Peter and Norton’s psychotic yet vulnerable Tommy Lee Royce in the BBC’s Happy Valley. But when we first see Peter he appears polite and relaxed. Instead it’s Kate Fleetwood’s Agnes who comes across as fidgety and anxious. She’s a cocktail waitress who craves hard drugs and vodka to blot out memories of her failed marriage.  

The pair are introduced by brassy biker Ronnie (Daisy Lewis), and before long jittery romance brightens Agnes’s seedy Oklahoma City motel room. But when they finally clamber under the covers, their intimacy is disrupted by an insect that nips Peter. Soon there are a lot more of these crawling, biting intruders — Peter improbably insists that they are aphids and must be a relic of the US army’s decision to use him as a guinea pig for its bid to develop a new and bizarre weapon. 

As Peter’s paranoid delusions intensify, Letts’s writing treads a curious path between twisted thriller, black comedy and luridly gory spectacle. There are moments, too, when it oozes a sour lyricism. Simon Evans’s production takes a while to exert its grip and could do more to suggest the squalor of the characters’ lives. But as Peter’s claims get under Agnes’s skin, so this portrait of infestation gets under ours.

leetwood convinces as the needy, feverish Agnes. Haunted by visions of her lost son, she unravels before our eyes. Meanwhile the impressive Norton slowly exposes Peter’s psychological injuries. As he treats his body like a laboratory for a series of gruesome experiments, every audience member’s flesh starts to crawl.

Author: Henry Hitchings