Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 23 May 2008, and touring

Little Otik (photo - Tim Morozzo)

“ARE YOU barren?” asks the creepily precocious girl of her next door neighbour. The woman is indeed barren – and as desperate to be fertilised as the dark earth that covers Kai Fischer’s set. So desperate is she that when her husband teasingly pretends that the tree stump he’s dug up is a baby, she takes him at his word and bonds with the piece of wood.

This is the premise of Vanishing Point’s surreal tale, an adaptation of the cult Czech film by Jan Svankmajer. But what promises to be a study of a woman’s neurotic need for a baby takes a much stranger turn.

Drawing on a traditional Czech fairy story, the play moves into mythical territory when the wood really does come to life. Getting more than they bargained for, the infertile couple find their new baby Otik developing a voracious and insatiable appetite – and growing at an alarming rate.

All this is in the film, but director Matthew Lenton goes a step further in this National Theatre of Scotland co-production by underscoring the idea that childhood is a thing to be feared. The young girl – given a remarkably assured performance by Rebecca Smith in her first professional role – is a constant other-world presence, enigmatic and unsettling.

The arrival of Otik is presaged by ominous film projections of swimming sperm, growing foetuses and crawling babies, making human reproduction appear as alarming as it does in David Lynch’s Eraserhead. The other side of the coin from Otik’s scary growth is the elderly upstairs neighbour sexually preying on the girl, the epitome of an adult world that has become unhealthily cut off from childhood.

Also taking his cue from the film, Lenton plays with surrealist imagery – a real cat in a pram, puppet figures emerging from the soil – in a visually brilliant production enhanced by Christopher Shutt’s menacing score.

With strong performances from Sandy Grierson and Louise Ludgate as the parents, it’s a highly enjoyable production that treads a fine line between black comedy and gothic horror. The only downside – at least for those of us who don’t have a pathological fear of childhood – is that after the event, it all seems a tad inconsequential.

(Little Otik is at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on 3-4 June 2008)

© Mark Fisher, 2008

Links

• Vanishing Point
• National Theatre of Scotland
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog