Review: Threshold, Zoo Roxy

Written for Culture Wars

You can’t accuse 19;29 of lacking ambition. Previously, they’ve placed Sarah Kane’s Blasted in its real-life setting of a Leeds hotel room and transformed a derelict town hall in London into a ghost-filled maze of identical doors for Hall. Here, they file us onto a coach on Roxborough Place and deposit us, a hour later, at an isolated manor house seemingly torn straight from the pages of E.E. Nesbitt.

Like Macbeth before them, however, ambition proves the company’s ruin, just as it did in Hall earlier in the year. In fact, it’s starting to look as though their problems stem less from foolhardy aspiration than dogged carelessness.

Trooping off the bus, we are cast as guests at a warped wedding ceremony. Flute of flat champagne in hand, we are introduced to the four Hunter children – jolly-hockey-sticks types one and all – and the house staff. The groom, their father, remains conspicuously absent – much to the newly arrived bride-to-be’s confusion – as we traipse and dart around the gardens behind one or other of the characters. Here we hide in the bushes, there we dash through a maze, always aware that secrets and locked doors hold sway over the children’s lives.

Yet, after a handful of ends, both loose and dead, it becomes quite clear that the young company doesn’t have the answers. It’s all too symptomatic, for example, that the bolted cellar door conceals an empty room and that the wicked father – always the bridegroom, never the husband – fails to appear. It’s pretty much all hokum, seeking to provide little more than a cheap spook.

Nor, as merry dances go, is it a particularly satisfying one. While there’s fun to be had in being outside – even in Thursday’s downpour - the failure to investigate the audience relationship is fatal, generating overblown performances composed of character traits. Given how Enid Blyton it all is anyway, the Hunter family become ridiculous creatures and our interactions are left us hovering between bemused disbelief and awkwardness.

We’ve seen these symptoms before, of course. Threshold is almost entirely reliant on its site and the titillation of the chase, which makes it more National Trust than National Theatre.