Simon Ward reviews Cold, Dark Matters at the Hope Theatre

Writer-performer Jack Brownridge Kelly’s one man show is endearingly low tech. Aside from an exploded shed (due acknowledgment paid to artist Cornelia Parker on the blackboard outside) and a chair, there is no set. More than once I felt myself transported to a staged reading in Victorian times – there is a definite lineage here to some of Dickens’s macabre tales and, still more, to Edgar Allan Poe’s. But under the direction of Roisin McCay-Hines, and with the clever use of sound and lighting, the show is gripping throughout. Indeed Brownridge Kelly’s adroit and assured rendering of the characters encountered is enough to make you completely forget that he is alone on stage.

The conceit is that Jack, actor, Cornwall resident and long-distance commuter, unable to think up a story of his own, but with a venue booked and an expectant audience to satisfy, has borrowed a story from an acquaintance, Colin. This is what is presented to us. As a recent arrival in Cornwall, Colin is anxious to integrate with the local community. To that end, he sees great potential in an old, abandoned shed, which he thinks could be used as the centre for a set of allotments. Little does he know that the villagers have other ideas. He soon finds himself trapped between the machinations of Ethel, the officious town busybody who wants him to sign up for everything from book club to wild swimming, and of the mysterious and taciturn Jago who claims ownership of the shed.

Starting off as a fish-out-of-water comedy, with the naive townie no match for the cunning countryfolk, a feeling of uneasy tension increases as the story progresses. When Jago points out that centuries of tin mining mean that the land actually oozes arsenic, what should be an enormous red flag only piques Colin’s curiosity further. He is happy to sidestep the attentions of Ethel but he is desperate to be befriended by Jago, and to be accepted into what he no doubt believes is the ‘real world’ of the village. And all this means that he is too easily seduced into believing that blowing things up with fertiliser is just how they get their kicks in the countryside without pausing to ask the question why.

In many ways this is an evening that is hard to characterize – at times hilarious and highly entertaining, never less than engrossing – it is also, in the end, distinctly unsettling. Perhaps this is especially so for an urban Islington audience who might well find themselves transplanted to the country and trying and failing to overcome the same challenges as those faced by our hero.

This is a piece which reminds us once again that great things can be achieved on an almost bare stage. Highly recommended.

Cold, Dark Matters runs at the Hope Theatre, 207 Upper Street, Islington, London N1 1RL