Nuclear War, theatre review: A tantalising experiment with theatre and movement

Rather than dealing topically with the threat of nuclear war or its wintry reality, this new piece from the prolific Simon Stephens is about loss and its isolating effects. What’s more, it's billed as 'a series of suggestions’, not a fully fledged play.

It's the fifth time Stephens has worked with choreographer Imogen Knight. But here the playwright is explicitly making a foray into the realm of dance, and Knight directs, bringing a truculent energy to a text that's unapologetically opaque.

The characters have no names, and only one of them - a mature woman played with anxious intensity by Maureen Beattie - is identifiable as a person rather than an assortment of gestures. As she travels round a city (apparently London), voracious for the details of everyday life, she's haunted by memories of a death seven years ago.

She is stalked by four other figures, who function as an oppressive chorus, showering her with whispers. Each has a distinct manner - for instance, Beatrice Scirocchi moves with feline litheness while Gerrome Miller has the trancelike focus of a zombie. But their performances have a quality of shadowy elusiveness, as if they're figments of the woman's troubled imagination.

The result is an atmospheric yet ambiguous experience. Broodingly lit by Lee Curran, it features jagged music courtesy of Elizabeth Bernholz - otherwise known as Gazelle Twin and a purveyor of angry, claustrophobic electronica.

As in so much of Stephens's work, there's a fixation with loneliness, flight and regret, as well as with the callousness of a society that has lost its capacity for empathy. At 45 minutes it seems a fragment of something bigger. But there are sharp images and flavours.

Stephens has talked a lot about wanting to work more collaboratively - about his appetite for ‘skydiving blindfolded’ and getting away from the text-based culture of British theatre to embrace the medium’s physicality. His developing professional relationship with Imogen Knight is enabling him to that, though for now the partnership feels like a tantalising experiment.

Until May 6, Royal Court; royalcourttheatre.com