ajhlovestheatre

DARKLING

by Titas Halder

directed by Matthew Xia

Bush Theatre, London – until 24 October 2026

running time: 90 minutes no interval

https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/darkling/#about

Is this the most harrowing piece of theatre in London at the moment? Probably… Titas Halder’s solo play looks, with a unique combination of poetic lyricism and painful truth, at the 1984 industrial disaster in Bhopal, India where thousands of people lost their lives (and hundreds of thousands more were permanently maimed or disfigured) when toxic gases leaked from an American-run pesticide factory. Darkling is an angry dream of a play, the leading character’s opening assertion that “I was born under a blue sky / in the city of lakes” coming back to haunt her, and us, by the end of an unsettling ninety minutes.

Halder filters this lamentable event through the eyes and experiences of an unnamed young woman (Linnea Berthelsen giving the sort of performance where you genuinely wonder how she’s going to manage this eight times per week) from infancy to an existence blighted and broken forever by the horrors of what occurred. Halder doesn’t spare the character, or us in the audience, much: the biting poverty of slum life is evoked (the world-building in Matthew Xia’s deceptively unadorned staging is remarkable), family tensions are exposed, including a suggestion of incestuous sexual abuse involving the heroine’s older but still underage sister, a hastily arranged loveless marriage, and the staggering, and ongoing, human cost of the disaster is counted.

It’s a tough sit for sure (any humour leaves the building about half way through and never comes back) but the storytelling is gripping and, in the end, almost unbearably moving. Halder is too intelligent a writer to overly sugarcoat the leading character’s life before the disaster, but, for all its problems and privations, it still seems like paradise compared to what comes after.

The subtle brilliance of Berthelsen’s performance burns slowly. She’s all untethered, borderline unfocused, energy at first, which convinces as a gauche, optimistic child, her voice a brittle, light instrument. She does a decent job of morphing into other characters: a slight stoop and an outstretched hand as her stricken, widowered father (“I, myself, am the lowest of the low for failing you and for failing her”), straightened back and wide, sorrowful eyes as her elder sister, a cheeky bravado for the young man who seems to be a brief respite from her misery. But it’s the subtle transformation that really impresses though: it’s like watching somebody age before your very eyes. Her trauma-fuelled descent into horror, despair and palpable, white-hot anger doesn’t happen suddenly, despite the shock of the accident, and her deterioration is managed with skill and stealth; at the performance I attended many people, me included, were weeping openly for the last ten minutes.

Technically, the production is a marvel. Composer Niraj Chag and sound designer Beth Duke keep a constant thrum of foreboding running underneath the words, and a sole round light on Simon Kenny’s austere but atmospheric set can seem starkly institutional at one moment, then a gorgeous shining full moon at the next. Throughout, Rajiv Pattani’s lighting is a thing of shape-shifting.

Not as much of a thing of shape-shifting wonder as the leading lady though. Some of Berthelsen’s line readings bely the accent of her adopted country of Denmark, which oddly adds to the impression of somebody recounting a litany of things so dreadful she can barely comprehend them. By the end, all hope and dignity destroyed, she wields a shamanic power, a reminder in human form, part vengeful and part hectoring, to those in positions of power and privilege not to forget the future-less victims of their greed and hubris: “stay with me / don’t leave me here / scatter me as I’ll scatter my child”. Darkling is astonishing.