At first, you think of Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 psychological horror film, which shares its name. Malthouse Theatre’s artistic director Matthew Lutton is – after all – fond of stage adaptations of sci-fi and horror cinema, from Solaris to Nosferatu. But Hour of the Wolf has virtually nothing in common with Bergman’s genuinely scary descent into madness, neither thematically nor on the level of basic plot.
It’s a further dive into “immersive theatre” after Malthouse’s 2021 production Because the Night. That show riffed on Hamlet in a visually arresting but dramatically inert way; the script, by Lutton, Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Ra Chapman felt painfully prosaic when held against Shakespeare’s original. With Hour of the Wolf, Lutton has handed over the playwriting duties to Keziah Warner, who also penned his Nosferatu. It works better – which is still not to say it works at all.
We are in Hope Hill – the kind of spooky rural town of popular imagination rather than actual topography – at precisely 3am on the annual night of the wolf. People are jittery and nerves are frayed, for “she” is on the prowl. She is Mrs Wolf (Natasha Herbert), the rich widow who years earlier turned from charitable doyen to vengeful maw and must now be placated with offerings (it used to be children; these days it’s mainly just bread).
The town is peppered with characters caught between scepticism and superstition. Mary (Katherine Tonkin) explains Mrs Wolf’s backstory to newcomer Mia (Emily Milledge) with almost gleeful abandon, while filmmaker Vic (Christina O’Neill) thinks the whole mythology is bonkers. Some people, like Janey (Brooke Lee), are desperate to escape; others, like her ex-girlfriend Alex (Eva Rees), are trying to hold on to what they have.
Individual scenes play out and then characters go their seperate ways; it’s up to the audience members to decide who they’ll follow into the next scene in a theatrical choose-your-own-adventure. When one scenario reaches its conclusion, the bell tolls and the clock winds back an hour, a device that makes logistical rather than dramatic sense. It is modular storytelling, interchangeable and looping, but it also lacks tension and catharsis.
Lutton has put a lot on energy into atmospherics, and on a technical level the production is seamless. Anna Cordingley’s set design is sumptuous and richly detailed – if never quite as intricate as Dale Ferguson and Marg Horwell’s work on Because the Night. Amelia Lever-Davidson’s lighting is beautiful, adding depth and visual complexity to the various spaces. Jethro Woodward’s sound design is ingenious; the audience headsets bring the actors’ voices right into your skull.
But the script is a big problem, leaden and obvious. It constantly turns subtext into text, explicating what should remain subliminal or suggested. Exposition is clunky and the dialogue often banal. The scenarios are heightened – there’s a stabbing, a murder, a car crash – but not enough to tilt into genuine baroque, and the cast struggle with a register at odds with the intimacy of the playing space.
Several first-class actors, from O’Neill and Tonkin to Kevin Hofbauer and Karl Richmond, are solid but also less than stellar. Others, like Jack Green and Keegan Joyce, are simply awkward. Milledge is excellent as the brittle outsider, disappearing inside herself in a way that has the audience leaning in. Herbert, as Mrs Wolf, is apparently stalking the liminal spaces and gathers select audience members for an expository monologue, but I didn’t get as much as a single glimpse of her all night.
It’s easy to blame yourself for the production’s gaping holes, and in some ways the conceit functions as its own get-out-of-jail card: if you don’t “get” it, if the narrative fails to coalesce for you, it’s because you chose the wrong path through and missed some key information. A cynic might say it’s a deliberate way to convince audience members to come back a second, third or fourth time. Maybe this could be mitigated by a longer running time; at just over an hour, there’s not enough chance for full immersion, for layers of meaning to accrue.
Such are the pitfalls of immersive theatre, which feels more akin to gaming than traditional theatre – laser tag for intellectuals. Hour of the Wolf is ostensibly about myth-making and the monsters created and sustained by communities, a salient topic for sure – but it fails because its ellipses are empty, its tropes hackneyed and its conclusions hollow. Bergman, like David Lynch after him, created work of deeply personal artistic expression. His monsters were emanations of the soul. This wolf, unseen and yet demystified, is a monster of commerce, which is scary in a way Lutton probably doesn’t intend.
