Theatre review: Anna

On the one hand, it's disappointing to have a show at the National where cheap tickets are very thin on the ground; on the other, I can't complain if this is part of a new policy not to sell Dorfman side seats if they offer no view of the stage whatsoever. The reason you need to watch Anna head-on or not at all is that Vicki Mortimer's set is entirely behind a letterbox of sound-proof glass. This is because Ella Hickson's play is co-created with star sound designers Ben and Max Ringham, and making sure the audience hears, through headphones, only exactly what the creatives want them to hear is at the heart of the show. This is another show built on binaural sound, and the technology has obviously now progressed to the point that it can be made portable. And so everything we hear comes from the perspective of Phoebe Fox's titular character as she walks around her East Berlin flat.

With the audience listening in on a character's every move it makes sense that Hickson and the Ringhams were drawn to a Cold War story, and a setting where the fear of surveillance is constant.

Anna is preparing a party for her husband Hans' (Paul Bazely) workmates, to celebrate his recent promotion, but when they arrive she's horrified and thrown into a state of shock, as she's convinced Hans' new boss Christian (Max Bennett with bleached hair, because presumably someone thought he didn't look quite Aryan enough already,) is actually a figure from a dark moment in her past.

Hickson's story immerses us into a world of paranoia and danger, as everyone steps on eggshells around committed party man Christian - when Elena (Diana Quick,) wife of his predecessor who got "disappeared," arrives uninvited, all the other guests studiously ignore her existence. In the colleagues' conversation, generic office politics goes hand in hand with something much darker: Marion (Nathalie Armin) worries that her husband is depressed at his lack of promotion, but Dieter (Michael Gould) knows his prospects have disappeared because he's displeased the wrong people. Karl (Dwane Walcott) has a fear of doctors that goes back to his days as a potential sports star and the unspecified things that were done to him to make him succeed.

At the same time Anna also functions as a home intrusion thriller, as we're led up the garden path as to whether or not Christian - who turns out to have been dating Anna's friend Fredericka (Lara Rossi) for the last few months - really is a stalker or just a lookalike Anna has projected her past trauma onto. The show ends with a "no spoilers" request so I'll say no more about how this plays out, but the play continues to confirm that thrillers and tension are a great use for this audio technology. Natalie Abrahami's production is blocked largely traditionally, so it took me a while to adjust to hearing from Fox's perspective - if she's facing the audience, sounds coming from our right come out of the left headphone and vice versa. But it's fascinating to see how quickly this technology has advanced in recent years and how inventively theatre is embracing it: Anna uses the surround sound to menacing effect, and delivers a satisfying, twisty thriller.

Anna by Ella Hickson and Ben and Max Ringham is booking until the 15th of June at the National Theatre's Dorfman.

Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.