Theatre review: Cougar

Rose Lewenstein's strange and sexy Cougar puts a luxury hotel room on the Orange Tree's in-the-round stage, a single set that stands in for dozens of identical rooms around the world. The first one is in London where Leila (Charlotte Randle) has been speaking at a conference. One of her colleagues made an aggressive pass at her in the hotel bar afterwards, and barman John (Mike Noble) came to her defence, hitting him with an ice bucket and losing his job in the process. Leila's taken a room in the hotel and brings John back to it for the night - nothing happens between them but they both want it to, so she proposes a deal: She'll pay for him to come with her on her many international business trips, have sex with her at night and see the world during the day while she's at work. But as soon as they get through customs they're strangers again, and John has to promise not to fall in love.

Leila's job involves getting major corporations to adopt greener policies, and as one of the foremost experts in her field she's always lecturing around the world and her salary keeps increasing. But however important she says her work is, it doesn't actually seem to be changing anything.

Lewenstein's play is made up of many short scenes, Chelsea Walker's production jumping from one to the next with short blackouts and quick flashes of light (Jess Bernberg's lighting clearly differentiating between different moments in the narrative.) Although the overall story is told in a mostly linear way, individual scenes are played out of order, the odd scene from much earlier or later in the narrative also appearing to disorientating effect. In fact with the stylistic similarities to Constellations I occasionally wondered if we were also seeing moments from alternative ways their relationship could have panned out. Ultimately I decided that wasn't the case, but the narrative device does bring home how messy their seemingly ordered relationship is (something Rosanna Vize's design references even more literally.)

The title references the term for an older woman with a younger lover but also a dangerous creature, and where Leila remains enigmatic she definitely starts to seem like a danger to herself and others. She harbours self-destructive fantasies about prostitution, and uses her money to exert subtle controlling behaviours over John, most notably when she makes him change all his clothes to ones she bought him, which are identical in every way, but made by Gucci. This scene means Noble has aFULL-FRONTAL MALE NUDITY ALERT!which goes some way to explaining why Leila keeps John around even when he starts to annoy her. John on the other hand is a much more heart-on-his sleeve character, as enraptured by Leila as he is the exotic locations she takes him to, but as the relationship and the world outside start to unravel he gets disillusioned with both. Unable to leave the room because of violence outside, the fact that the rooms are identical starts to make them a prison.

Where Cougar is less convincing is in this linking of the two themes; I get the feeling Lewenstein intends quite a specific metaphorical link between the way the relationship falls apart and the environmental catastrophe (the latter being the major trigger for the former.) We certainly get the general idea though, and if the play's wider themes don't quite have the same impact, Walker's production, and Randle and Noble's performances make the screwed-up relationship compelling. It borders on the baffling, consciously questioning whether it's a dream at times, but Cougar sucks you into its world.

Cougar by Rose Lewenstein is booking until the 2nd of March at the Orange Tree Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: The Other Richard.