John Donnelly’s Apex Predator is an oddball new play. It achieves the rare feat of yoking together an exploration of post-natal depression, humanity’s gradual slide towards extinction, and unsettling portraits of modern-day vampires. At the centre of the storm is Mia, a mother who feels her life is rapidly spiralling out of control. Her time is consumed by tending to her wayward son, Alfie, and her five-month-old baby Isla. Her marriage is on the rocks – she doesn’t know where Joe, her husband, is sneaking off to at night, or even what he does for a living. It’s not surprising that Mia is drawn to Alfie’s teacher, Ana, who displays the icy confidence and survival skills that she lacks. But what is the mysterious source of her power?
While the script provides rather broad-brush characterisations, the actors make them strangely gripping. Laura Whitmore does well as Ana, a vampire masquerading as an art teacher whose caring concern for her pupil and his mother tantalises the audience about her real intentions. Her glacial stares and impervious manner of speaking are bone-chillingly eerie. As Mia, Sophie Melville offers an acute portrait of a woman losing her mind. She brings to scenes a Chekhovian sense of stillness and dissatisfaction. Her marriage is about as bloodless as the corpses her aloof husband (Bryan Dick) investigates for the police. Moreover, when confronted with a flasher in the park she’s disturbingly placid. The monotonous trials of domesticity, the play contends, leave Mia already feeling like one of the undead.
Donnelly adds to this sense of strangeness, a dramatic language which is chock-full of vulgarities. Mia opens the play complaining of her intolerably selfish neighbours as ‘total cunts’ for blasting music until ‘fuck-off o’clock’. Marital woes are exacerbated by the fact she feels like ‘someone’s had a go at my nipples with a Brillo pad’ and hasn’t had a ‘decent shit’ in a year. Indeed, these people sound like they’ve learnt how to speak from spending too long watching the very worst of Netflix shows. But it’s an astute observation on Donnelly’s part. In a culture where beauty in its truest moral sense fades out of sight, what do we expect will happen to language?
The backdrop for this battle of predation and survival is Tom Piper’s utilitarian stone white set (all the better for showing those dramatic splatters of blood) which is moved around to function as a classroom, a park and various London flats. A feeling of uncanniness and dream-like familiarity is generated, making us question what is real and what is the product of a mother’s sleep-deprived hallucination. However, Blanche McIntyre’s direction fails to follow through on these supernatural strains, impairing the smoothness of scene transitions and creating incoherence in the play’s mood. The interval, which broke up the tension at its height, was an unforgivable error in a play that is under seventy pages long.
Donnelly’s Apex Predator is a timely and thought-provoking play written to a world that needs to relocate its moral compass. It commendably explores a number of pressing issues, most significantly women’s mental health in the early stages of motherhood, but due to insufficiencies in the script and direction, it does so without developing them in a satisfying way. In fact, its central proposition, that the only way women can exercise control and have power is to become a vampire, is both wildly fantastical and deeply troubling. But there is something stirring beneath all this darkness, the tremors, perhaps, of a moral awakening.
Apex Predator
By John Donnelly
Director: Blanche McIntyre
Photo credits: Ellie Kurttz
Cast includes: Sophie Melville; Laura Whitmore; Leander Deeny; Bryan Dick; Callum Knowelden.
Until: Saturday 26th April 2025
Running Time: 1 hour and 40 minutes, including an interval
31st March 2025