Ria Zmitrowicz in The Glow
(Picture: Manuel Harlan)Alistair McDowall’s madly ambitious new play may be the boldest metaphor for climate catastrophe since Don’t Look Up. Or an indictment of the way women have been treated through the ages. Or a supernatural horror story, a myth, or all of the above. It’s a beguiling, baffling, sometimes absurd 120-minute ride for the mind, directed like a pacy genre thriller by Vicky Featherstone, with a transfixing central performance from Ria Zmitrowicz. It’s totally bonkers and I kind of loved it.
We first see Zmitrowicz’s character as a nameless, voiceless waif acquired by a female Victorian spiritualist to act as a passive “conduit” to the nether world. Oops. Turns out she’s actually a life force in female form, who doesn’t eat or sleep, can’t be killed, and can sometimes accurately, sometimes randomly, transport herself and others through time. The action shifts from 300,000 BC to 1348 AD to WWII to a retired nurse’s modest house in the 1990s. This leads to some deliberate and some accidental era-clash comedy. Don’t consider this a spoiler: I’ve barely scratched the surface.
