Certain Dark Things

Franco’s brutal dictatorship of the 1950s saw paranoia and secrecy permeate every level of society, seeping into the private lives of families across Spain and the Basque country, tearing communities apart. International theatre group You Need Me examine this era in history: an era that holds personal relevance for some of the cast, whose Basque and Spanish origins infuse the play with a sense of immediacy.

Certain Dark Things effortlessly draws parallels between the wider socio-political landscape and the micro-drama of a repressed family. The play has a haunting quality that elevates it from a well-produced drama into something entirely unique. Its soundtrack, performed live onstage by the actors and a lone cellist, burrows into your psyche, hiding in your subconscious long after the play ends. The physicality of the acting is nothing short of astounding: the actors move themselves and their props around the stage like one living, breathing organism. Mime is liberally utilised, but never to the degree where the play begins to resemble an exercise from a drama class. Impressively, while the staging is decidedly low-tech, every scene has a remarkable cinematic magic about it.

While the story is emotionally involving and intelligently structured, some awkward, clichéd dialogue along the way can be distracting. It is at times all too obvious that the play was written by the cast, rather than one coherent voice. A pleasingly minor flaw, however, in a production from a theatre group with the enormous talent and subtlety of execution that is required to stand out in a sea of mediocre devised theatre.