4 STARS, May 1-6. “A man wearing a straightjacket can only be one of two things – a failed escapologist, or a madman.”
Michael Sherwin & Andrew Ryan
A remote lunatic asylum, an autocratic doctor, a sadistic killer – admittedly, Mindgame hardly sounds like a laugh a minute. But one of the (many) surprises of Horowitz’s sly and slippery play is that it invites us to laugh at the thriller genre.
That’s not to say that Mindgame isn’t dark. It explores murder, madness, and evil, and questions what motivates people to commit terrible crimes. Nothing can be taken for granted, from the name of a pet Labrador to the identities of the three main characters. Still, the play is at its strongest when it probes the fault line between attraction and repulsion, and draws out the farcical potential of the macabre.
Andrew Ryan plays Styler, a writer of gory serial killer biographies who’s come to Fairfields asylum to interview his latest subject. His path is blocked by Dr Farquhar (the Q is silent), who seems reluctant to trust Styler, and even more reluctant to let him leave.
Soon, Styler is trapped in a nightmare world that’s steeped in references to famous thrillers. There are murders behind curtains, intercepted notes of warning, echoing screams, jerky snatches of tinny music, and questionable liver sandwiches. It’s all piled on so thickly that you soon realise you’re watching a kind of pastiche of the thriller genre – one that exploits our fascination with tales of murder and lunacy.
At the same time, anachronistic references to modern day life – Ryvita, Lord Voldemort, motorway services, M&S carrier bags – are hilariously at odds with the shadowy timelessness we expect from our thrillers. Can this dark, twisted world really co-exist with the humdrum of day-to-day life? By poking fun at the tropes of thriller fiction, Mindgame roguishly hints that the gory fantasies we build around murder and madness might be just that – fantasies – which do nothing to explain why people actually do bad things.
Michael Sherwin & Sarah Wynne Kordas
The action of Mindgame unfolds in a single room – but don’t be deceived, the setting is anything but stale. The set has a life of its own – playful, teasing, unreliable – seeming to participate in the mind games played by the characters on stage. In fact, it sometimes comes close to upstaging the actors, tempting us to play a sinister game of spot the difference when we should be paying attention to the dialogue.
A window onto a manicured Suffolk garden is slowly bricked up as we watch. Props grow and shrink in size - pot plants bulge and balloon, chains lengthen and shorten. Doors that we assume are exits are revealed to be cupboards – then later, someone cheerfully exits through them. By the time the curtain rises on Act 2, the stage has undergone a complete transformation - the very wallpaper has gone feral. It gives the audience a powerful taste of what it’s like to doubt the evidence of their own eyes.
The small cast puts in solid performances as characters who constantly shift and change, swapping identities like a game of musical chairs. Andrew Ryan is persuasive as a writer who comes undone in the poisonous atmosphere of Fairfields. Michael Sherwin becomes more convincing as the play progresses, eventually pulling off a pivotal character shift simply by donning a jacket. Sarah Wynne Kordas does a good job with the difficult part of an overwrought, cringing nurse.
I would be lying if I said that I didn’t see the twist coming, but that didn’t spoil the pleasure of this absurdist, unreliable play. Mindgame invokes the wickedly thrilling spectres of Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, and Jack the Ripper, asking, can we love a murderer? And, almost more worryingly – can we laugh at one?
- Mindgame is at Windsor's Theatre Royal from May 1-6. For tickets visit theatreroyalwindsor.co.uk
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