Theatre review: After the End

It's a truism by now that any show staged seems to end up with a (usually bleakly) ironic relevance to current events, more often than not a different one than was actually intended. When Theatre Royal Stratford East scheduled a revival of a play about two people trapped together in a nuclear fallout shelter, they probably imagined it would raise the odd wry smile of recognition from people who've spent the last two years in and out of various levels of lockdown; instead it's more likely to remind a London audience that the Express is currently running articles about whether the compete annihilation of the capital by nuclear bomb would negatively impact on house prices in Surrey. Dennis Kelly actually wrote After the End in response to 9/11, which is why the nuclear weapon that goes off just before the story starts is a terrorist attack by a suicide bomber rather than an act of aggression by a foreign power.

Whatever the reason, Louise (Amaka Okafor) was at her leaving do when it happened, and only survived because she was outside the pub talking to her colleague at the time, and Mark (Nick Blood) was the subject of a running joke at the office because he'd bought a flat with a bomb shelter in the garden.

This is where he's now brought her, and with two weeks' worth of supplies they have to stay put, hoping a rescue party arrives before the food runs out - or their mental health deteriorates to the point that they harm themselves or each other. This could happen sooner rather than later because it soon becomes apparent Mark has been the office joke for as long as Louise has known him (taking the eternal cliché of having an improbably buff actor play a creepy geek to its natural extreme by casting an actual agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.) while he's been uncomfortably obsessed with her, and jealous of any colleague she flirts with. Soon, his taking care of her takes an abrupt shift into controlling, and he's withholding her rations for refusing to play Dungeons & Dragons with him.

The play opens with Mark explaining to the recently-revived Louise, who remembers nothing, exactly how they got there, and I was worried that we might be building to a twist ending that I'd guessed before the curtain was fully up. Fortunately Kelly doesn't take the audience for quite such fools, and by the mid-point the play has largely become about weighing up the possibility that Mark has abducted her against the alternative. Louise is 95% sure he's lying, but is 5% low enough odds to risk stepping out into a nuclear winter? Lyndsey Turner's taut production is helped by Peter McKintosh's stark design that feels like we've carved a hole into the underground bunker to peer in; Tim Lutkin's lighting design ensures we're never sure what new twists we might see after the latest blackout.

This is admittedly a show I only booked to see Nick Blood back on stage, but my persistent shallowness does sometimes pay off as it would have been a shame to miss it: Blood may look as good as ever but he still pulls off a distinctly creepy role (but I'm still not going to complain about him getting his arse out.) And Okafor matches him, her character strong and resilient but with hints of a twisted nature of her own - the way the characters react to every shift in the balance of power is one of the ways the play keeps you guessing. You could apply similar levels of ambiguity to what the play is really about, from toxic masculinity and dangerous delusions to metaphors about the way the West treats volatile regions of the world - when Mark reveals inevitable right-wing tendencies in his views on terrorism, you could even see connections to the people blaming the invasion of Ukraine on pronouns. After the End turns nasty in both expected and unexpected ways, but with Dennis Kelly writing it's no surprise if there's also an element of dark humour underscoring it that helps make this as nuanced as it is intense.

After the End by Dennis Kelly is booking until the 26th of March at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: The Other Richard.