With a deceivingly simple concept, The Nightmare Room sets a cleverly-placed rabbit hole right under your nose to slowly plunder into a stack of many unseen twists and turns in a single white room with two women, one a brash, deceptive businesswoman, the other a frightened, more reserved friend and hostage to the psychotic Catherine’s deadly game. Thinking there’s but one way to settle who gets the love of an American movie star, the actor Michael’s wife Catherine kidnaps and locks her childhood friend Helen, whose secretly been having an affair with him, in an empty room and challenges her to a game of fate where one of two glasses of water is filled with a lethal poison. Both must mix them around and drink. One leaves and one ends up becoming a despaired memory. While the sole concept and set are overwhelmingly basic, I heavily underestimated the play’s writing and performances while seeing the first half, with a seemingly obvious plotline and pretty over-the-top acting from Sarah Korad’s Catherine (not to mention a pretty overly-stretched scene of Helen checking for cracks of cheating in Catherine’s game). The second half, however, shifts things into gear with immaculate uses of flashbacks to see the two character’s true nature and the stability of their connection as you guess back and forth just who’s actually in control and if Micheal has a bigger part in it than you thought….
The play’s bold, sharp style gives a constantly smooth identity, such as the flashbacks used to get to grips with the two’s backgrounds (with an ear-deafening crash and cut to black in-between each one) showing impressive shifts between scenes with lighting-varieties capturing different moods and making things a little more unsettling, given the dead-end circumstances of the present, as well as the excellent immediate shifts in character from the actors, such as changing from Helen and Catherine having a relaxed business drink to Catherine muttering obsessively over Michael alone. The good varieties of lighting colour carve out an increasingly entrancing mood, only to eventually snap back to the present with the blinding intensity of ‘The Room’s’ white walls, cleverly giving the same effect as having a blindfold removed, which is a nice touch of fourth-wall break when Helen is blindfolded and strapped to a chair at the beginning.
But again, it’s not perfect. I personally found Sarah Korad’s acting as Catherine to be exceptionally engaging in the flashbacks and all the second half with heavy psychotic energy, but I found there was little difference in her character’s mood throughout the flashbacks and the present, which could’ve been improved by having a more calm and collected persona for her in the flashbacks, only to slowly descend into psychotic obsession when she suspects more that Michael doesn’t care for her and gradually gain more unstable and deceiving attributes to the present time, making things more impactful and engrossing, not to mention a bigger effect with the immediate shifts in moods in the cuts between past and present. Even so I found her to occasionally be a little over-obnoxious with being a total control freak in the first half, but not really enough to affect my engrossment.
Angie Smith’s acting as Helen, however, is generally a much more stable, laid-back character so it makes sense she remains the same person throughout and makes her sudden empowered, confident self when she thinks the game is on her side and reveals how Michael would only ever want her all the more surprising. But either way, the two’s acting mostly keeps up great, except for a rather unnecessarily audacious display where they play out a scene of their young children times and put on a hugely audacious, albeit intentionally childish telling of Rumplestiltskin that goes horribly wrong. But this can still be seen to add more flavour to the two’s development as it show’s Catherine’s been a control-freak since her childhood years.
Now I’d like to talk about one of the play’s key instruments in avoiding any attention drifting from the character’s chemistry: the hugely simple, yet overwhelmingly captivating set-piece of the tall plain room with white walls. This allows that suspecting tension to rack up much quicker on the audience with such a brutal focus. There’s no furniture moved, relying completely on lighting, giving a nicely slick style. The set also morphs into giving an impression of Catherine’s deception, shown in her clothing attire where she wears all white to match the room, but she’s shown to be anything but innocent.
The loud, audacious crash between stages in time does make the performances more engrossing and sparked a few reactions out of the audience, but it admittedly got irritating after a while and almost killed the mood. And as clever as the time-changes are utilised, they can move a little too quick for comfort, not always dragging things out to build a more engrossing tension and grasp on the situation, making the pacing a little disjointed, not to mention your focus being constantly obliterated with the crash. But these are just minor flaws in this greatly solid play.
The Nightmare Room is quite a unique psychological thriller about the dangers of lust, envy and crippling love that thinks quite the distance outside the box (the very big white one) in theatre and the engaging actors make the two-character story work greatly as the control stick constantly bounces between them and keeps your guesses at an immeasurably high level until the bone-chilling twist at the end with an immensely clever use of a single sudden change to the set that pulls a hugely disturbing impact, given how closely you’ve gotten attached to the room’s nature with the characters, which I won’t spoil. While the acting isn’t flawless and the pacing isn’t entirely polished, this production’s epic suspense and electrifying chemistry reels you in all the way, as well as the flashbacks tying into the present seamlessly for further tension and is mostly recommended by me. Go see The Nightmare Room and get trapped in your engrossment in the theatre room as heavily as Helen is trapped in with Catherine!