Invasive Species at King’s Head Theatre – review

This New York import is less a play than a theatrical delirium, a wild stream-of-consciousness thrill-ride that mostly makes up in energy and imagination what it lacks in coherence. Creator and star Maia Novi draws on her own experience as a Hollywood-obsessed aspiring actress who journeyed from her native Argentina to study at Yale, but it’s her mental health journey that is the real meat of Invasive Species.

In the run-up to her drama school showcase, Maia visits a doctor to source stress-relieving sleeping pills but ends up waking up days later in the youth ward of a psychiatric hospital with no idea how she got there and with nobody being informed of her whereabouts. Novi’s script leaps about with a restless abandon matched by the dynamic, shape-shifting production by Michael Breslin who also helmed the off-Broadway version.

Novi plays a version of herself with refreshing candour and lack of vanity; her stage persona is strident in her ambition (“I had to shoot for the top! I had to move to the centre of it all!”) with an intense edge. But she’s also endearingly goofy, such as when she tries to model her new American accent on Gwyneth Paltrow (“Good morning guys, I’m gonna take you through my morning Goop routine”) or when in drama class she tries to pass off an overwrought improvised monologue as being from a Spider-Man movie.

Around her, Breslin groups an impressive, chameleonic quartet of performers (Kalifa Taylor, Harrison Osterfield, Max Percy, Ella Blackburn) popping up as other detainees in the psych ward, fellow drama students, tutors, doctors and, particularly hilariously, as Maia’s manic mother and a flamboyantly monstrous agent. These other roles aren’t so much fully realised characters as figures in an ongoing nightmare that Maia is trapped in. Nothing is as nightmarish as Osterfield’s turn as the Acting Bug, the desire to perform manifested as an actual giant insect, complete with gleaming mask, alarmingly phallic proboscis, and lascivious attitude.

The lighting and sound (Ben Jacobs and Dominic Brennan respectively, based on the original New York production) work wonders in creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and hysteria, where perspectives always feel slightly skewed and it’s hard to know what can be taken at face value. The first 15 minutes make for thrilling theatre, inventive, propulsive and gruesomely funny, but thereafter a certain amount of self-indulgence kicks in and the impenetrability starts to get a little tedious, despite the bravura performances. It’s quirky and original, but it gets exhausting.

In an amusing fluke of timing with Evita just completing its Palladium run, the sections where Maia is being directed as Eva Perón in a film (“we cut the song!…We’re not doing a musical here. We’re just doing the speech”) acquire a tart, topical humour. Occasionally, the frenetic flashiness of the presentation threatens to obfuscate the seriousness of the mental health issues and suicide ideations alluded to in the text, but weaving theatrical invention and jet black humour into such a troubling narrative is no mean feat. This won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it announces Novi as a bold, distinctive talent.