The Glow review

Ancient folklore tears through the fabric of time, but it’s nowhere near Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. Drolly witty scenes dance across the demands of a spiritualist medium, yet it couldn’t be further from Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Alistair McDowall’s genre-busting, time-travelling The Glow deals in shades – in every sense – of those and more, not least Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, yet its voice is entirely and fascinatingly singular.

Merle Hensel’s imposingly sculptural, steeply walled, yet cunningly moveable set initially pulls off the trick of making the Royal Court stage seem vast and claustrophobic – an ideal setting for a study in time and space. In 1863, spiritualist medium (deliciously imperious Rakie Ayola), is instructing the silent young woman (Ria Zmitrowicz) she has found and decided will be of use. There is, she explains, the world of matter and the world of the spirit – “that which remains unseen by the great majority”.

It’s the latter that McDowall threads through time-travelling scenes leaping forward, often humorously, into the 1990s and as far back as the Lower Paleolithic Age. The link through all these initially oblique moments is the Woman, with febrile Zmitrowicz forever lending her an unnervingly determined, powerful presence. The play gradually becomes a fictional biography, built through shards of narrative. 

Often mute but shimmering with rage, the Woman struggles to understand herself and to assert her ability to act of her own volition. One of McDowall’s considerable strengths is the way he achieves that through action in obliquely written short scenes rather than via traditional explanatory dialogue. Chronology is largely irrelevant, yet he creates narrative tension via repeated patterns of power play between the Woman and those who seek to control her. 

Zmitrowicz’s character’s core strength ignites under pressure. Her explosions – assisted by Tal Rosner’s fleet video work within the perfectly meshed design team – are so vicious and terrifying that the fearsome first act horror-story climax leaves the audience gasping to know what happens next.

Controlled as much by Jessica Hung Han Yun’s sharply angled, wildly atmospheric lighting as by Vicky Featherstone’s clean, clear direction, the tonal shifts continue in the somewhat less invigorating second half. Key characters played by the other three cast members develop fuller relationships and the underlying narrative becomes clearer and more affecting.

McDowall’s control of form sharpens the theatrical friction of his intriguingly juxtaposed questions. It’s disappointing, therefore, that it ends with a kind of deflating answer. An over-explanatory address by the Woman places her within a vision of folkloric energy. Featherstone and her design team do everything to bolster it but cannot quite disguise the fact that the laudably ecological ending is faintly undramatic: the only point where The Glow reads better than it plays.