Playwright and performer Malaika Kegode tops and tails this show for Theatre Royal Plymouth with a message about the allure of storytelling. In a festival city bursting at the seams with stories, it is an unnecessary observation. A more important question is about which stories we choose to tell, which resonate and which pass us by. Why, for example, did Kegode want to write a story – and it is a story rather than a play – about the strange disappearance of a maudlin folk singer?
She focuses on the subsequent investigation by Meles Costas, an under-qualified true-crime podcaster, living in the shadow of a high-achieving and terminally ill mother. And she laces her story with gothic fairytale imagery: folk songs with dark-magic properties, human-to-animal transmutation and a hint of witchcraft.
All intriguing stuff, but if Badgers has a greater purpose than telling a story for its own sake, Kegode does not make it evident. Fortunately, she tells it well. Casting the audience in the role of Meles (whose name is the Latin for badger), she describes a podcast interview with Bridget Brock, the missing man’s landlady, and juxtaposes it with the supernatural: did singer Ben vanish in 2015 because he had turned into a badger and was it because he had been cursed after stealing Bridget’s song?
With a badger stripe hair-do, Kegode leads us with charm and precision into the haunting corners of Jenny Davies’s production, with texture added by her longtime collaborators, Jakabol, whose excellent score is played live by Beth Roberts and Joe Williams, tucked away in a sound booth. All good stuff for a dark and stormy night, but unless you are concerned about the ethics of true crime, not particularly urgent.
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At Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, until 30 August; Theatre Royal Plymouth, 2–5 September; Bristol Old Vic, 8–12 September
