Simon Ward reviews Little Sister at The Glitch Theatre

The subterranean performance space at The Glitch, reached by a non-descript door which could lead anywhere, feels like an appropriate setting for Alice Flynn’s unsettling and eerie play. With no set, and actors interspersed among the audience, Mark Fenton’s sound effects alone help to create the impression of a remote, desolate Irish location, under unrelenting rain. This is the home of Bridget (Beca Barton), which she shares with girlfriend Heather (Georgina Musgrave). It is clear that beneath her bluster, Bridget is vulnerable and fragile – Heather is her rock and her support. Tonight, however, Heather is going out to the local quiz night in the pub, as they always do, but Bridget has decided not to join her. She will be fine, she insists. So, the scene is set – a dark night, an almost-empty, isolated house – what could possibly go wrong?

As if out nowhere a woman (Anna Coupe) appears at the door, her head freshly bleeding but refusing any medical help. Eventually it becomes clear from her meandering, nonsensical monologues that she is, or thinks she is, or is claiming to be, Bridget’s eldest sister, Shona. But this is impossible because Shona disappeared more than 20 years ago, and has long been officially declared dead. Her disappearance brought the family a gruesome kind of celebrity – the world of true crime loved to interweave the facts of the case with the fairytales of Irish folklore, like the hero Oisín being lured to Tír na n-Óg, the Land of Youth. When Oisín returns, after what seems to him almost no time, everyone he knew is dead because many years have passed in our world. Might Shona, after some unknown enchantment, also return? Is it possible that she is actually in the room right now?

Faced with this impossible conundrum, Bridget calls on her older sister, Sally (Mimi Millmore). An aspiring writer, a minor celebrity, married to a TV personality, Sally has clearly parlayed her childhood brush with notoriety into a rather successful life. And her experience in the media world of exploitation makes her cynical and hard-faced when it comes to interrogating the woman who claims to be their Shona. Yet how can the woman know so much about their lives, things that have never been shared with anyone outside their family? The two sisters harbour so much resentment and bitterness over the impact of what happened to her, or what she did, that they are far from ready to welcome back a long-lost sister. And as she is infuriatingly unable or unwilling to give any explanations, so their anger grows. As the play draws to a climax it becomes impossible to know what is real and what is fantasy.

The claustrophobic setting means that sightlines are sometimes challenging – there is no reserved seating so aim to get in early and sit in the front row. Director Liam Rees swings the action around the room as though giving us different camera angles – in fact the piece as a whole had a filmic feel, with abrupt cuts between scenes where we were never quite sure where we were in the chronology of the story. The piece may have gripped more tightly and delivered even more of a chill if the scenes had been more sharply delineated. That said, it is a compelling and disturbing narrative, and one that rings very true in a world where the ghoulish fascination with crime and mystery is not necessarily matched with empathy for those caught up in it.

Little Sister is running at The Glitch Theatre, 134 Lower Marsh, London SE1 7AE until Sunday 1st March