At its best it’s a nightmarish depiction of new motherhood in a hostile urban environment – with lashings of dark humour thrown in.
Then writer John Donnelly takes a handbrake turn into horror, and if the supernatural, comic, and psychological elements don’t always fuse, Blanche McIntyre’s production is bracingly bold, quirky and never dull.
Sophie Melville comically captures the hallucinatory sleep-deprived stress of the breastfeeding mother – constantly bouncing a fretful baby while coping with a noisy neighbour, and older son Alfie being bullied at school.
Yes there’s something of the night about Laura Whitmore’s glacial and later vampish beauty, whose offer to fortify Mia against women’s fears and anxieties turns out to be have an eternal edge.
Plus Mia’s partner Joe (Bryan Dick) is working all hours helping Police to comb chatrooms and discover who is dumping blood-leached bodies into the Thames.
Designer John Piper conjures a functional kitchen surrounded by scaffolding, suggesting the precariousness of this nuclear family whose sinister 11-year-old (on our night Callum Knowelden) keeps appearing in pyjamas and home made mask.
McIntyre deploys descending coloured screens to jump cut scenes and suggest this might all be a product of Mia’s fevered postnatal brain.
If this were Florian Zeller we’d be kept guessing, but Donnelly is ultimately literal with the gore and schlock horror.
Whitmore is an enigmatic presence and has an intense chemistry with Melville’s Mia – even if she never quite suggests the weary old soul that Ana is meant to be.
Leander Deeny plays all the other comically unpleasant men that Mia encounters, and for all its vampire references, the play is ultimately a punchy revenge fantasy of a mother moving through a world where sexism, climate change and crime feel out of control.
Apex Predator runs at Hampstead Theatre until April 26.
