Gunter
Royal Court Theatre, London

MESSY by design, Gunter is also, unfortunately, messy by nature – a play so concerned with its own theatricality that it has no atmospheric heart.

Based on a dark, real-life tale of 17th-century English witchcraft, it should be full of fear and loathing, yet Gunter’s co-writers Lydia Higman, Julia Grogan and Rachel Lemon have, in their breathless pursuit of quirkiness, managed to strip it of any resonant core.

On a bright, bare, clinically lit stage that gradually becomes splattered with mud and blood, four members of the Dirty Hare company – Higman and Grogan, with the addition of Hannah Jarrett-Scott and Norah Lopez Holden – play out the sad story of a supposedly bewitched young village girl, Anne Gunter, while dressed in Slazenger sports tops, sometimes also wearing sunglasses and cowboy hats and largely using modern-day language.

Having thus deprived the play of any sense of time and place, it’s left to a 21st-century narrator-cum-musician (Higman) to give us some context for what’s going on, supported by sporadic lines of commentary projected onto a cloth backdrop.

The actors, meanwhile, seem to try to compensate for the displacement of the story from its gritty English roots by adopting an exaggerated earthiness, shouting, stamping and swearing their way through scene after scene.

To add to the mish-mash of un-rootedness there’s also a ragbag of musical accompaniment, none of it with any sympathetic connection to the subject matter, while the characters are imbued with a remarkably eclectic range of accents given that they live in an isolated Oxfordshire village in the early 1600s. Nothing is really as it should be, but without any consequent payback.  

There’s no reason why Gunter’s story should be played as a straight-down-the-line period drama, but equally there seems little justification for presenting it in such a dislocated shape.

The play had its premiere last year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in its chaotic determination to avoid doing anything “obvious” it does feel very fringey. In another setting, even one as sympathetic to experimentation as the Royal Court, its creators would have been better advised to make some concessions to boringly normal stagecraft.

Runs until April 25. Box Office: (020) 7565-5000, royalcourttheatre.com