Review Roundup: APEX PREDATOR World Premiere at Hampstead Theatre

John Donnelly's Apex Predator is now running at Hampstead Theatre. The production stars Laura Whitmore as Ana, Sophie Melville as Mia, Bryan Dick as Joe, Leander Deeny as Victor, and Callum Knowelden and Lorcan Reilly who share the role of Alfie.

They're obsessed with climate change.  See, we're their food source and we're heading towards extinction.  It's causing them a lot of anxiety…

Mia is going out of her mind in a flat with a baby that won't feed. Her son Alfie's getting bullied at school; her husband Joe is working all hours for the police on a job he can't talk about; the neighbour keeps blasting music at 2am; and another body has been found in the Thames. 

As Mia desperately looks for something in her life she can control, Alfie's teacher Ana proposes an unconventional route to empowerment – and suddenly the hunted becomes the hunter…

John Donnelly's genre-busting new play is at once a sophisticated critique of the way we live now and a supernatural thriller. Donnelly's other plays include The Knowledge (Bush) and The Pass (Royal Court).

Director Blanche McIntyre returns to Hampstead following her record-breaking production of The Invention of Love. See what the critics are saying...

 Debbie Gilpin, BroadwayWorld: The problem is that this is yet another female-centric story that suffers by being told by a man. Parroting clichés about fashioning house keys into a weapon just shows that Donnelly has listened to a news broadcast at some point in the last five years, and any attempt at showing what it’s like for Mia when her partner Joe all but accuses her of being hysterical just makes her seem annoying. It’s a writing issue rather than performance, as the dialogue simply goes nowhere.

Chris Wiegand, The Guardian: Its scenes of foggy parental psychodrama are similarly vivid to Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s 2021 drama Mum, which also starred Melville. But fundamentally, for Donnelly’s ambitious play to succeed, you have to feel swept into its supernatural world and I just didn’t bite.

Stephanie Osztreicher, West End Best Friend: It might not dig as deep as some might hope, but it offers enough brooding atmosphere, sharp dialogue, and unexpected moments to keep audiences hooked. It certainly leaves viewers questioning: is Mia’s anger justified? And if given the chance, how far would any of us go to reclaim a sense of power?

Daz Gale, All That Dazzles: Sophie Melville leads the cast as Mia, taking on a demanding role that requires her to balance the extremities of her new unexpected situation. Mixing the humanity with the supernatural, she showcases a mother on the edge and a woman struggling to know her place in this world anymore with the sense of power and sporadic uncertainty. It’s no tall order, and even when the show dips slightly, Melville’s performance remains captivating. Though underused, Bryan Dick gives Melville plenty to work with in their scenes together as her husband, Joe, while Leander Deeny takes on a wide variety of roles in frequently funny portrayals that all seem to end the same way.

Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out: Apex Predator is an enjoyably outlandish way to tell a story about postpartum depression. It hints at being something bigger, at really embracing its genre trappings in a wider screen way, and it feels a shame it doesn’t go there – stuff like Ana fretting that climate change will deprive her of a food source or reminiscing about the Great Fire of London is tossed out but never explored. But if it doesn’t add up to a masterpiece it’s still pretty damn great, a serious story told in a wickedly entertaining way.

Clive Davis, The Times: Whitmore, better known as the former host of Love Island, brings a sheen of breezy normality to Ana’s otherworldly character. All the same, just as the last offering here, Beau Willmon’s AI drama East Is South, resembled a discarded TV mini-series, you sometimes feel as if you’re watching a screenplay for a film that never got the green light.

Sarah Hemming, The Financial Times: But what begins as an unsettling exploration of the porous barrier between internal and external worlds (reflected in Tom Piper’s set of a kitchen surrounded by scaffolding) runs out of road. The play’s supernatural element starts to feel increasingly shaky and the metaphor stretches too thin. Meanwhile the psychological territory becomes too serious for the form: there’s a deeply disturbing twist at the end that doesn’t feel well supported. It’s a bold contemporary reworking of a myth that refuses to die. But in the end, like its protagonist, it bites off more than it can chew.

Terry Eastham, London Theatre1: Summing up, Apex Predator remains a conundrum for me. Whilst it’s impressive how much story is pushed into the eighty-odd minutes of stage-time, particularly in the strong second act, the characters on the whole felt underdeveloped and there were just too many questions asked but not answered. However, the acting and staging were both pretty impressive, though some of the scene changes felt a bit clunky. Ultimately, to me, this feels like an opportunity lost with a story that has a lot of potential but, despite some great work by the acting team, ultimately fails to fully deliver.