Who is the Haunted Child in director Jeremy Herrin's neatly-staged production at the Royal Court?
At first, the answer seems obvious - young Thomas (a role shared by Jack Boulter and Jude Campbell) senses ghosts in the house, wets the bed and generally displays the attributes of the side-swiped and unnerved.
But the re-emergence of run-away husband Douglas (Ben Daniels), toothless, ramshackle and semi-coherent with tales of re-birth and enlightenment suggests he could also be the spooked offspring - after all, he claims Thomas is the reincarnation of his dead father so the family tree is somewhat tangled.
Astride this troubled axis, Julie (Sophie Okonedo) attempts to hold the fragments together. The son needs stability and discipline. Fuelled by manic electricity, Douglas believes the opposite. Their lives have become humdrum and their grim passage from dreamers to trudgers is making them sick.
Julie's sensuous seduction appears to unpick his carefully woven explanation but tension lingers over Douglas's final decision - family or philosophy.
On the surface the argument is stacked in Julie's favour. The unease of the boy, the pragmatic urgency of his mother and the sinister demands of the "cult" that adopted Douglas during his meltdown all tend towards the cliche - namely, Dad has the freedom to explore his disappointments while Mum is busy making jam and toast and carting the kid off to school.
In his turn, Douglas is a mix of self-indulgent teenager, blank-eyed cypher of a manipulative cult and just plain mad.
But occasionally the heady lure of his argument and the passion in his eyes coalesce into something close to persuasive - and they are moments of eerie disorientation.
This is mostly Ben Daniel's piece - veering from soapbox fulminator to slick-haired advocate. But Sophie Okonedo has much to do to give Julie more dimensions than a nagging wife and victim. The presence of a child on stage is always disquieting (properly so in this case) but Jack Boulter is an effective catalyst for the woe.
By making Douglas more brittle than enlightened, writer Joe Penhall shies away from a full-on exploration of the central question but this new work is still a gut-wrenching mechanism to examine the potential catastrophes family life.
Until Jan 14. Go to royalcourttheatre.com
– From December 2011
