Review: SEA CREATURES, Hampstead Theatre

From the Ancient Greeks to the Impressionists, artists and writers have been trying to decipher the sea's mystic powers for centuries. Whilst there are enough dramatic flourishes in Cordelia Lynn's Sea Creatures to give it a degree of uniqueness, it treads too familiar waters for it to float on its own terms. Without strong performances it would be lost at sea.

His unseen girlfriend Robin having abandoned him, Mark, a scraggy millennial academic retreats to Robin's rustic family home by the seaside in the hopes that she will return. He can hardly contain his insecurities that scream within him. He snaps at her sisters with condescending nastiness and patronises them with masculine arrogance.

There is something Pinteresque about his menace. Maybe it's the theatrical echo of The Birthday Party, also set by the sea. Or maybe it's the queasy language and roster of seemingly solipsistic characters silently drowning in their own issues. Robin's aging academic mother has early onset dementia, played with kind tenderness by Geraldine Alexander, and her sister, a boisterous Pearl Chanda, is coping with an unwanted pregnancy with drinking and smoking.

The lapping tide slowly erodes Mark's façade. Sharp fragments from his childhood reveal the traumatic burden of a broken home and the painful absence of his girlfriend has left him once again in search of the security of a mother figure. By the end his twisted insecurities have crumbled away leaving him psychologically skinny dipping.

We are immediately there with him. "Immersive" may be a contentious word in theatre nowadays, but Zoë Hurwitz's deeply atmospheric elemental design is subtly gorgeous. Morning light washes back and forth over the small but warm space and a calming tide inhales and exhales in the background like an ASMR video.

Given how meditative the production is, it comes as no surprise to learn that the play was written at MacDowell, a rural artists' residency in New Hampshire. But as quaint as the place looks from a Google search, it doesn't seem the most lively of places. Unfortunately this languidness finds itself reflected in the production's patience-testing tone.

So much of it is unnecessarily drawn out. Poetic ramblings that evoke the sea's spiritual side feel especially elongated and do little to map out the on-stage world. Neither does the self-conscious ambiguity. We are given incomplete snapshots of "the university" and "the men with knives." We never learn why Robin is missing. I confess that I zoned out whenever someone started babbling about mermaids or ghosts and the unbroken two hour run time did elicit a few yawns from the audience.

But the main issue is more fundamental. Sea Creatures lacks an identity of its own, emotions are familiar and its direction predictable. Iris Murdoch's The Sea The Sea feels like a direct inspiration. There is a remarkably similar family resemblance even down to Mark's curious obsession with cooking, clearly a coping mechanism to distract from his inability to relinquish his past (as in the book). Murdoch uses humour to unpick her pathetic protagonist's existential crisis; Lynn gives her story a 21st century sheen of slow burn sinewy grittiness.

Without strong performances it would be washed away. Tom Mothersdale is particularly magnetic as Mark, understated but devastating, balancing inner conflict and external cruelty with the tiniest of gestures. Watch the way his eyes hurriedly search for solace when the power balance shifts away from him. Like the set design, it's subtle but gorgeous.

Sea Creatures runs at Hampstead Theatre until 29 April

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

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