This excellent production is a slug of rich, complex whisky on a dark and stormy night. Come up the stairs, where the ripped wallpaper has been graffitied by disturbed, creative minds, and take your shabby seat in the musty house of twins Presley (an assured Todd Emerson) and Hayley.
Artist Philip Ridley's 1991 playful yet taut psychological thriller explores abject fascination with fragile bodies, and ushered in an era of shock dystopian British plays.
The scenario is a superior forerunner to Polly Stendham's 2009 Tusk Tusk: innocents fend for themselves and are afraid to leave the house. In an inspired touch, director Sophie Roberts puts Hayley (the compelling Michelle Blundell) on a tricycle, evoking The Shining and its forever-juvenile twins.
But her horror is not ghosts but reality. "I'd have to talk to the postman!" cries Hayley, imagining the terror of interacting with the world. She doesn't have notches on her bedpost; she decorates her bedspread with shiny chocolate wrappers - then hides under it. (Daniel Williams' atmospheric, realist set is wonderfully inescapable.)
The twins' petty domesticity is contrasted with their excited delight in visceral shaggy wolf stories of their own imaginations.
