Review: ECHO, King's Head Theatre

“What is it about this hotel room?” This is the question posed by a cast member of Echo, over halfway through the play, when we’ve been trapped inside a deliciously kitsch B&B, all lilac wallpaper and shag carpets, for over an hour. The effect is claustrophobic, somewhere between the Overlook Hotel from The Shining and the apartment from Rosemary’s Baby, and the horror doesn’t stop with the set design.

A woman credited only as ‘She’ (Amara Okereke) is supposedly on an anniversary trip to the hotel with her husband ‘He’ (Kyle Rowe), but it soon transpires – through a turbulent combination of resentment and violent sexual roleplay – that He intends to remedy their fertility struggles through cloning She. Later, another couple (played by the same actors) visit the same hotel room and feel equally trapped between their future reproductive choices and tensions felt in their past lives. Life-changing revelations, of course, ensue.

There are big, confronting ideas on display in Susan Eve Haar’s script (which was previously performed as Paper Doll at the Edinburgh Fringe), and the production is crushed under the weight of itself. Too often, the protagonists descend into metaphor-heavy monologues on infertility, identity, and consent, instead of developing the intimacy between one another necessary to make these themes properly resonate. Rowe’s domineering husband in particular often feels like a caricature of masculinity designed to play off of his wife’s more complex characterisation, rather than a real person forming one half of a real relationship.

Given the subject matter, it’s also a shame that Echo is structured more as soap opera than as speculative fiction. The play’s three rough ‘acts’ are marked with two plot twists which stretch reasonable suspension of disbelief, and with their lack of subtlety obscure any more nuanced commentary in the script. There’s a fascinating recurring image about She associating her infertility with her imminent death, for instance, but the culmination of that image – her ashes buried in the shag carpet – is cloyingly literal.

Where the script lags, though, the cast pick up the slack. Okereke was previously seen in the reimagined 2022 My Fair Lady at the Coliseum, and some of the petulant resistance to patriarchal abuse she brought to Eliza Doolittle is visible here – an early scene where a childlike She puts her hands over her ears to block out her husband’s confrontation sticks in the mind. The character eventually encompasses the full spectrum of experiences of infertility and motherhood, ricocheting through all five stages of grief and back again, and Okereke provides subtlety even when the script is at its most unsubtle.

There is something consistently cinematic about this production, both in writing and in Matt Powell’s ambitious projection design. Eighty minutes feels tight for a show that tries to be so many things at once, but also long for a show that doesn’t know what to do with the ideas it introduces. Perhaps Echo might have been better off reimagined for the screen, where the intriguing concept would have the space – outside of that accursed hotel room – to be fully explored, without descending into telenovela shock value.

Echo plays at the King's Head Theatre until 17 August