Review: The River, Royal Court

The maxim behind Jez Butterworth’s new play might as well have been ‘Next year, as far from Jerusalem as possible.’ Following the unruly and rambunctious epic that capped the last decade, Butterworth returns with an intricate, elegiac miniature that’s perhaps even more enticing. To throw off the title, one might say its still waters run very deep indeed.

The River exists deep in Butterworth County, a place that ranks alongside Philip Ridley’s East End, even Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, for its completeness and its otherness. Like those writers, Butterworth is a worldmaker. Properly equipped, you could probably hike from the log cabin onstage here, to which Dominic West’s Man retreats, shackled with fishing tackle, to the decrepit cottage of The Winterling or Rooster Byron’s woodland clearing in Jerusalem.

That cabin, detailed and atmospheric, is once again left to the panoramic designer Ultz, but Butterworth paints a landscape beyond its wooden walls that’s every bit as vivid. You can see the way the moon must catch the dew-laced grass late at night and the bleached rocks that surely line the riverbanks. You picture the cliffs, the pools, the paths, the precise sunset: “Blood red as far as the headland turning to lilac blue wisps above the bluff. Trails of apricot, feathering out through blue, dark blue, and aquamarine to an iris ring of obsidian and above that the Evening Star.”

But it is to another worldmaker, Harold Pinter, that The River owes its biggest debt. Ostensibly a three-hander, it has all the slipperiness of Old Times and tinkers with temporality as well as Betrayal. No, better, heretical though that might seem, because it bucks that play’s schematicism.

Butterworth ensures that we’re never quite sure where we are in time, what comes first and what follows. West’s Man arrives at the cabin with a new girlfriend (Miranda Raison), intent on taking her trout fishing, to experience the thrill of the catch . (“Like a million sunsets rolled into a ball and shot straight into your veins.”) Then suddenly, another woman, The Other Woman (Laura Donnelly), steps into the room in her place and what seemed romantic becomes routine, any spontaneity dissolving into something altogether sinister.

First and foremost, Butterworth has written a great story; one that hooks you in with the narrative momentum of a thriller in isolation. Cut off from ordinary law and order, anything could happen. Chuck in Butterworth’s characteristic mystical tint, his ability to invoke some deep-rooted natural power, and that anticipation only intensifies.

It’s a story that also sets you backpedalling, scrambling for some mysterious motivation behind the Man’s actions. The routine eventually reveals its roots in some elusive search to rekindle a past relationship, but what relationship? With whom and why? And when? Butterworth leaves all blank and the near-total ambiguity is tantalising, almost to the point of infuriation.

That totally extends into any sense of meaning. It’s elusive stuff. About time, perhaps, and the impossibility of recapturing the past, the ones that get away, be they lost loves or first fishes. Transient and escapist, time runs away. The river is never the same. But it does throw up enticing echoes along the way and everything in Butterworth’s play has its double, its photonegative. Mirror images recur, in the surfaces of water, in line drawings. Even fish flip-flop when caught; one side, then the other.

Deeply engrossed in the story, yet always aware it’s an oblique fable of sorts, you’re left trying to catch its wisps, grasping at smoke, and there’s little more satisfying than this sort of mystery. All the better that Ian Rickson’s entrancing production is played with a dry inscrutability by Dominic West and plenty of allure from Miranda Raison and Laura Donnelly as the two women in his life.

Photograph: John Haynes