Theatre review: The Cord

Writer-director Bijan Sheibani has worked with Irfan Shamji multiple times before, so you can see why he'd take advantage of that working relationship to cast the extraordinary actor in his latest play as well, putting him at the centre of an intense mental breakdown in The Cord. It's an evening that put me in mind of The Father, in the sense that it's a brilliant evening of theatre I'm glad I caught, but not necessarily one I'd want to put myself through again. Ash (Shamji) is a new father, whose wife Anya (Eileen O'Higgins) is still recovering from a birth with some complications, but apart from the inevitable lack of sleep is largely settling into her new life, and bonding with the baby. Ash seems to feel slightly excluded from their new group, but it's only after his mother Jane (Lucy Black) visits that this seems to tip over into a more serious mental condition.

Sheibani's production plays out on Samal Blak's simple, carpeted in-the-round set with only four plain chairs dotted around it, but Oliver Fenwick's lighting and Colin Alexander's music - which the composer plays live on the cello on stage - conjure up the play's inner and outer worlds.

So the lighting takes on darker colours and the music becomes oppressive and jarring as we go from something naturalistic into something nightmarishly abstract. Sheibani does a good job of trying to provide balance and sympathy for the women in the story - Anya is having to deal with a new baby largely on her own, and Jane has a chronic pain condition that's worse than she's letting on, so neither of them are able to focus exclusively on Ash's depression, even as it increasingly looks like he could be a danger to himself and others.

But ultimately this is putting the audience into Ash's mind and that's not a particularly comfortable place to be - it doesn't ultimately matter what his wife and mother say to him, it all comes across as them pushing him out of his own family, diminishing him, blaming him, or dismissing his depression. While essentially more about the inner turmoil than the story, there's still a satisfying plot progression as we find out how guilt over his own mother's post-partum depression might be affecting his own, and why it was triggered by seeing her meet her grandson.

Shamji was the attraction for booking a show that looked like it could be pretty bleak, and as usual he manages to exceed expectations: Randomly, I kept thinking about how the reason Stephen King hates the movie of The Shining is that Jack Nicholson comes in mad and just gets madder, whereas the idea of a likeable everyman becoming corrupted is scarier. And what Shamji gives us is absolutely the latter; even as you begin to fear him you retain sympathy for him, and he's such an engaging actor he retains the element of hope the author seems to want to keep going - this is the Bush, not the Royal Court Upstairs, after all. A show whose treatment of anxiety and depression hits so close to the bone I was physically curling up at points, but very impressive.

The Cord by Bijan Sheibani is booking until the 25th of May at the Bush Theatre's Holloway.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.