The Guilty with Russell Tovey at Donmar Warehouse – review

“Can you help me?” are the first words of Chloë Moss’s The Guilty… and they set the needy, anxious tone for everything that follows.

The play is an adaptation of the 2018 Danish film Den Skyldige, which prompted a 2021 American film starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Add the ingredient provided by theatre – all being in the same room while events unfold in real time – and the result is a 70-minute slice of claustrophobia and panic, so tense it catches the breath.

Russell Tovey plays Joe, a police emergency dispatcher, alone in a room, coordinating police response to the incidents that are reported by disembodied voices on his headset. In the swift opening scenes, we see him assisting those in need, dismissing the time-wasters (“What’s the emergency? Your neighbour’s party?”), applying brusque efficiency to all he does.

But we also realise there is something else going on. Joe is in this room because he has been taken off normal police duties. He has a disciplinary hearing the next day, and a colleague he wants to be sure says the right thing. He talks on his own mobile to his daughter, revealing tenderness and humour, but when his estranged wife comes on the line, she is furious. Then a terrifying call comes in, a life and death situation that he suddenly has to deal with.

Director Felix Barrett, of Punchdrunk fame, who recently brought Paranormal Activity to the stage, manages the ratcheting dread with consummate skill. Not a moment of rising fear is missed, as Joe seeks to solve the scenario that is slowly unfolding in his – and our – imaginations.

On a set by Alex Eales of dusty dullness, all shades of grey with a dying plant on the filing cabinet and unused monitors covered in plastic, the only points of colour are a blue water cooler bubbling in one corner, and the lights (designed by Anna Watson) – the flickering fluorescent bar overhead, the red pinpoints showing an emergency is in progress. Gareth Fry’s soundscape – the noises heard over the phone, the chair and floor scraping as Joe moves anxiously around the room – frays the nerves.

Tovey is superb, commanding the stage, his reactions – a fractional raise of the eyebrows when someone annoys him, a rising sense of involvement and concern when he realises he truly is in the midst of an emergency, a flash of anger when his wife tries to cut him off – always readable, always convincing.

At the close, there is another surprise, another coup de théâtre which it would be a shame to reveal. It is a brilliantly contrived and executed theatrical experience. My problem was that I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t buy the idea that a man in Joe’s position would be entrusted – alone – with such a job, or that he would react in quite the ways he does. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief, so I was always distanced from what is undoubtedly an extraordinarily gripping and clever piece.