Based on Robin Redbreast by John Bowen

Starring Maxine Peake

At Aviva Studios, Manchester until May 26, 2024

After a painful break-up, Norah moves to a remote cottage in the countryside where the idyll soon becomes a nightmare.

While the publicity for Factory International’s latest production, Robin/Red/Breast, didn’t explain its baffling use of forward slashes (was I supposed to delete where not applicable?) it did entice me by promising ‘an intimate, immersive and voyeuristic take on a folk horror classic’.

Apparently, John Bowen’s 1970 BBC Play for Today had cult status, but to my shame it had somehow passed me by, however I saw this as an opportunity to come to a piece of genre theatre with no preconceptions.

By ‘immersive’ I imagined the experience would come at me from all sides, perhaps like a promenade performance, with stage effects used to surprise my senses – not just sight and sound, but smell and touch as well – a great premise for turning horror into a live experience. And it was going to be intimate as well, so the performance would be happening within touching distance… even scarier!!

The poster boasted a cottage glowing a hellish spooky crimson within the darkest of woods. If I was going to be ‘immersed’ in that, as a lover of horror, this was a show I couldn’t possibly miss.

Sadly, the line between ‘immersive’ and ‘water-boarding’ is a thin one.

On the way into Aviva Studio’s cavernous Warehouse space (about as intimate as an aircraft hangar) we were handed a pair of headphones. A recorded message gave me a set of instructions for when to don or remove the equipment. I was already stressing. We were guided to our seats.  Well… I say ‘seats’…. The stage consisted of a large octagonal planked floor, surrounded on all sides by hard wooden benches. You’ll remember the sort of thing from primary school, except that when I was seven, they didn’t force my knees up to my nipples and the prospect of an hour on a bench without any back support wouldn’t have filled me with absolutely the wrong kind of horror. My chances of being immersed in anything other than extreme physical discomfort seemed remote. But, hey, I was lucky – the front two rows had to sit on the floor. I only had a moment to ponder the fact that Aviva Studios has cost the taxpayer over £240 million, none of which had been set aside for my poor ageing bottom.

An all-female brass band in Sergeant Pepper uniforms entered the auditorium processing around the heavy wooden frame of a small cottage in the centre of the stage. I have no idea why, or what they were supposed to represent.

After they departed, came our first cue to don our headphones, and we spent the next twenty minutes listening to a breathy monologue from Maxine Peake as Norah, while she moped around the inside of the wooden house. Sadly, the beams from which it was constructed were so thick it was hard to see much of what she was doing. This was further impeded by a table, a cooker and a fridge, all of which conspired to make the experience about as intimate as trying to peer over a rooftop to see what’s going on in the next street. I gave up straining my neck and shut my eyes for a bit.

Eventually, the inklings of a story kicked into gear. Norah was alone and feeling threatened by the countryside, but had the hots for a hunky gamekeeper, which, when consummated, sent the house forty feet into the air. We took off our headphones.

I’m not really sure what was going on over the next forty minutes, but according to the website it was ‘a tale of bodily autonomy, power and rebirth’. I’ll take their word for it. It was something about choosing not to have a termination and going to a mother’s group worrying about one’s parenting skills. The brass band came back, played for a bit, and then one of the trombone players sat at the edge of the stage right in front of me and I couldn’t see much of the last ten minutes.

The show finished and I was still waiting for the folk horror (as opposed to bench horror) to begin.

Once I’d stopped fuming at the uncomfortable, incomprehensible, expensive pointlessness of the last bum-numbing hour, I resolved to investigate the source material. Luckily John Bowen’s original drama is available on Amazon. Surely, even Play for Today at its most pseudy couldn’t have been that bad.

From the comfort of my own sofa, I sat down to see how much of this I could get through. For the next 75 minutes I was entirely engrossed and, indeed, immersed in a complex and layered piece of lovingly rendered genre television. Yes, you have to get past the clipped 1970s accents, the awful haircuts and the dodgy backdrops, but the narrative and characterisations are so strong I was utterly absorbed. This easily deserves its ‘classic’ label. In creating a ‘striking and subversive adaptation for our times’, director Sarah Frankcom, Maxine Peake and writer Daisy Johnson have stripped the original of its narrative drive, eschewing all the tropes of folk horror that are not only at the heart of its meaning but are important cultural progenitors for dozens of films and series since from The Wicker Man to more recent movies such as Alex Garland’s Men.

John Bowen, a gay man, wrote a deeply thoughtful piece, not just about female autonomy, sexual identity, and a woman’s right to choose (just three years after the Abortion Act of 1967), but also exploring the control of gender – female and male – spanning both pagan and Christian cultures. There’s also a striking subtext as to the connection between far-right ideologies and English folk tradition (akin to the Nazi ‘Blood and Soil’ philosophy) which Bowen would have absorbed as a child in the 1930s. This is sophisticated stuff which the creators of this show have chosen to rip up in favour of something more worthy/incoherent/pretentious.

Verdict: Robin/Red/Breast is a poorly executed theatrical event which has been woefully mis-sold by the theatre. I heartily commend potential audiences to save themselves thirty-five quid (and a lot of bum-ache) and catch the original for 99p on their tellyboxes. 1/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com