Darkling with Linnea Berthelsen at Bush Theatre and on tour – review

In 1984, Bhopal in central India became home to world’s most catastrophic industrial disaster. Around 40 tons of toxic gas leaked from an American owned pesticide plant. Estimated fatalities reached 25,000 people, and subsequent generations still suffer from the contamination.

Titus Halder’s Darkling weaves this real-life environmental catastrophe into a folk tale for the age of post-globalisation. The breathless monologue traces how far the tendrils of neo-liberal exploitation reach, creeping into the developing world to strip its resources but blind to the consequences of its rapacious greed. There is an urgency that bleeds off the stage, but it feels like a work in progress. Frustrated by stunted writing, Darkling doesn’t penetrate beyond the surface level of its ideas.

An unnamed narrator unravels her life in an Indian slum. She slaloms between touchpoints: her family’s cycle of poverty, a result of the caste system that traps them at the bottom as cleaners, and her sister’s loss of innocence, first through an implied sexual assault, then an unhappy marriage our of economic necessity rather than out of love.

But the narrator’s childish naivety glazes over the hardships. Linnea Berthelsen (Stranger Things‘ Kali) bobbles and hops on an off the stage into surrounding dirt like a prancing rabbit high on a sugar rush. Beth Duke’s sound design provides the atmospheric heavy lifting: cars blur past to capture the claustrophobia of the city’s bustle, giving way to the open air of the countryside and the graceful balm of nature beyond it.

Though the sparse set leaves her nowhere to hide, and the writing doesn’t provide her with enough dramatic momentum to play with, Berthelsen hits just enough of the story’s beats to keep the audience with her and admirably snaps in and out of different characters to provide swift caricatures of the characters who inhabit her world.

Her naivety is most apparent when she anthropomorphises a new factory in her town. Through her eyes it is a benevolent steel giant, her fantasy stripping it of the foreboding threat we can sense on the horizon. Its jagged skeleton materialises like a poltergeist across a dirt-stained backdrop, looming behind her as if come to grab her away.

But Halder’s text becomes too unwieldy. Crafted in a viscous poetic whir, it signposts polemics about economic vampirism at the expense of the developing world, rather than enlisting its audience to intuit them for themselves: “Our lives are valued less, they made their money and left us” declares the narrator in a fist clenched address. The chemical spill brings the debate front and centre in visceral detail, the emphasis on bodies and biology is haunting but again too easily telegraphed to leave a lasting emotional mark.

Darkling is an uncut gem. There is rich material here glinting beneath Halder’s text that hasn’t yet found its shape. Berthelsen has the agility to carry the ideas, but the play needs a firmer editorial hand to pry polemic from poetry.