(Until May 19)
Two men are interrogating a teenage boy in a grimy room painted municipal greenish-grey. They throw him a Mars bar and a bottle of water, which he drinks greedily. They could easily be gangsters and the lad their hostage. It turns out they are police detectives and they are investigating the murder of a prostitute whose severed head had been found washed up on the banks of the Thames.
Three Kingdoms starts off as a logical enough thriller, told through police interviews and hinging on the quirky dynamic between Ferdy Roberts and Nicolas Tennant as detectives Charlie (posh, sensitive, offers suspects coffee) and Ignatius (not so posh, taunts suspects and thumps things) but it unravels into something far more chaotic.
The murder investigation turns into a hunt for a sex-trafficking ringleader, taking us from the West London police station to the lair of an Estonian gang via a seedy German hotel and a porn factory. The deeper Ignatius and Charlie dig, the more off-the-wall the treatment of the story becomes – characters tumble about the stage, emerge from suitcases or deliver lines with their head in a bale of straw. The second act is a full-blown hallucinatory pageant of gangsters and pimps in wolf masks, cabaret-style singing and sex-workers in cheap wigs and sequins. The nightmarishness finds its climax in a cacophonous rendition of PJ Harvey’s The Last Living Rose (‘God Damn Europeans/ Take Me Back To Beautiful England’). It’s exhausting and disorientating to watch – an effect rammed home by the multi-lingual nature of the show; huge chunks are told in German and Estonian with English sur-titles.
Part of London’s World Stages project, Three Kingdoms is three types of theatre from three different countries stitched together. It has a script by acclaimed British playwright Simon Stephens (The Trial of Ubu, Punk Rock), is realised by German director Sebastian Nubling and incorporates the athletic work of Estonian group Teater NO99. Although it’s a powerful collaboration, by the end the sutures irritate. Stephens’ initial whodunit plot is muddied by the increasingly surreal and hyper-physical staging. The feeling of being utterly lost in an alien culture, cut off by language, is precisely recreated by Nubling, but the plot falls by the wayside – with Charlie disappearing, inexplicably, from the action altogether.
And the visuals alone are not as interesting – or as nuanced – as what Stephens’ script had promised in the early scenes. The gallows humour and something-and-nothing conversations between the detectives, their methods for getting information from suspects, and the odd set-up between Ignatius and his young wife succeed in the same way Stephens’ plays Herons or Punk Rock succeed – with the big ideas quietly rooted in very specific people in very specific social structures.
But as the neat plotting and taut dialogue is abandoned in favour of something stranger, the ideas become more forced, the speeches more leaden. The choreography, lighting and Ene-Liis Semper’sdesign are all breathtaking, yet a lot of the imagery feels hollow without the support of the script – what does having the traffickers wear wolf masks and the sex-workers wear doe masks really say beyond ‘predator’ and ‘victim’?
This is the other problem with Three Kingdoms – it feels like a play about sex-trafficking without very much to say about sex-trafficking. Preoccupied as it is with barriers of language, globalisation, ‘the dislocation of travel’, and European identity, and without any real sense of the girls themselves, the sex trade in the play feels like mere window dressing.
For all its theatrical muscle, I found Three Kingdoms increasingly hard to follow and couldn’t shake the feeling that the heart had been cut out of Stephens’ writing some way before the interval.
