Fear and Misery : Time Out review

Time Out London posted a review with a tiny image by Robert Workman.

'Fear and Misery' plays in the Court’s downstairs bar, where a good-looking couple are eating pasta, drinking red wine and fighting over their son’s recurring nightmare. Does he dream of the headless soldier because they are rowing? Because they don’t live in a gated community? Or because Olivia feels a tiny hint of ‘rape. Sorry. Rape. Sorry. Rape. Sorry’ in her husband’s lovemaking.

Actors Joseph Millson and Joanna Riding absolutely nail the stuttering, rapid rattle of the couple’s alternately needy and aggressive dialogue. And as they fight their own domestic war on terror: rejoicing that the local gipsies are arrested; obsessively checking the batteries in the smoke alarm – a bloody soldier enters and makes his unseen way into their son’s bedroom.

The climax may bring shades of Sarah Kane, but Ravenhill’s scrutiny of large political issues via domestic detail is recklessly pertinent, and beautifully realised by the actors. The satire is sometimes strident, with the couple voicing a few too many headline-derived anxieties, and occasionally being set up as easy targets – ‘Cuddle’ implores Harry, after accusing his wife of repressing child abuse.

But their fear for, and even fear of their son, whose disturbed dreams act as a visible conduit for the kind of blood-stained reality they can’t quite wash out of their bedcovers, makes this a short but probing examination of what is repressed by our desire for security.