The Drought
King’s Head Theatre
 

THE isolated Victorian seafaring vessel is a rich seam that the horror genre has often mined for material, as recent TV series such as The Terror or The North Water can attest.

Nina Atesh’s The Drought, currently at the King’s Head Theatre, takes the same raw material and then, rather brilliantly, takes away the antagonist we expect — the sea.

When we first meet the Captain (Andrew Callaghan) and Garson (Jack Flammiger) they are the only two men still left on a Royal Navy vessel stranded in the middle of an ocean that has inexplicably disappeared.

The rest of the crew has gone for help and the two remaining men cling desperately to ritual and routine. “Someone will come for us,” the captain repeats, hopefully, or perhaps desperately, as Garson fixes the buttons on his jacket.

Into this absurd iteration of “keep calm and carry on” enters a stranger (Caleb O'Brien) who has spent days walking across the newly revealed seabed looking for any other survivors. He claims to be a whaler, but that might not be true, and his arrival sows the seeds of suspicion and unrest — long held loyalties and the very fabric of reality are called into question as the men look for answers and fight for survival.

Callaghan, Flammiger, and O’Brien all give engaging and committed performances, though the intensity can sometimes veer a little close to the melodramatic. At times they are also slightly undermined by a soundscape that doesn’t quite seem to trust them to build the intensity themselves.

Atesh’s script is the winner of the 2021 London Horror Playwriting Award and while the central conceit is brilliant, the ideas deserve more space — the play is a brief 65 minutes and more time for the stranger to sow his seeds of distrust or for us to explore the horror of the newly revealed seabed would be welcome.

But this is an engaging and atmospheric journey into a strange and unique world.

Runs until September 24 2022.Box office: 0207 226 8561, kingsheadtheatre.com