Wastwater, Royal Court, Dir Katie Mitchell, Design Lizzie Clachan
Intense. Within the Heathrow environs, three scenes are played out with chance references to people, situations or events, making a theatrical triptych. Everyone wants something and the scenes show degrees of humanity, callousness, cruelty in order to get it. It’s a dystopian view made all the more chillingly for its close, geographical proximity, and superb characterisations. The direction is meticulous and the actors have responded to this despite the often elliptical dialogue. The fractured lighting and soundscape of overhead planes make for an eerie backdrop. And the three settings: a farmhouse garden, site of a proposed runway; an up-market hotel bedroom; and whitened, distempered warehouse, is cunningly conceived by Lizzie Clachan. Yet the Wastwater in the title refers to one of the Cumbrian Lakes, a couple of hundred miles north of Heathrow, under which many bodies lie hidden. And this ultimately seems to be its point: still waters run deep. Yet only in the first pairing of Freida and Harry, a foster mother whose son is about to depart for Canada is there any real sense of one human being reaching out to another. 
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