Three Kingdoms

Olivier award-winning playwright Simon Stephens’s latest play is a co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith, where he is an artistic associate, and two European partners, and it is performed in English, German and Estonian (with surtitles), its staging being part of the World Stages London project.

This touring production, directed by one of the playwright’s favourite directors, Sebastian Nubling, tells the story of two British detectives, who – after a woman’s head is washed up in the Thames – travel to Europe in a hunt for her killer. Very soon, they are drawn into the unsavoury world of female sex trafficking, and eventually head to Estonia.

As directed by Nubling, this police procedural becomes a phantasmagoric state-of-Europe play, with lurid scenes about the German porn industry, and a nightmarish episode in Estonia. Punctuated with songs, dance moves and a passionate physicality, the kaleidoscopic tale rushes along, then pauses for a meditation on life, death, sex, or the differences between Britain and the Continent. Songs by The Beatles are sung.

Visually, some moments are stunning: the prostitutes wear deer heads and a sinister gang wears wolf masks. At its worst, much of the rest is overblown and overwrought, with the story drowned in a bucket of self-indulgence. Good work from British actors Nicolas Tennant, Ferdy Roberts and Rupert Simonian contrasts with the different styles of Continental actors Steven Scharf, Lasse Myhr, Jaak Prints, Mirtel Pohla and Cigdem Teke. Designed by Ene-Liis Semper, the production feels much too long and self-indulgent, despite some moments of savage feeling and poetic bliss, whose delights are chiefly due to Stephens’s text.