The Nest overeggs performances to give an uneven show

Having just read We Need to Talk About Kevin I seated myself in the packed Young Vic theatre with considerable foreboding. All I knew of The Nest, Franz Xaver Kroetz’ parable with an ecological warning, was that it involved a great tragedy becoming two young parents. I quickly realised that my assumptions had been partly wrong, unlike Lionel Shirver’s portrait of a psychopath, there is no evil child here, or at least not an ostensible one, instead the demon lurks in poverty and the exploitation of labour.

Conor McPherson’s new translation from the original German transports the tragedy to Ireland. The characters remain the same, the optimistic father, a long haul trucker; the beleaguered mother reluctantly off on maternity leave, earning a desperate pittance cold-calling for a bank. Obsession with money permeates their lives and their relationship. “Having a baby isn’t going to be cheap you know!”, the truism echoes through the thin walls of their home.

The set design was the aspect I liked most about this piece. The flat in which the play is set feels like an abandoned IKEA warehouse, deplete of all but the basic necessities. It’s sparse, and frugal; the sofa is also the bed. As the audience, we watch through the roof, as if we are voyeurs in a new dark expansion to The Sims. The outside world is no less ominous, shaded in the greys of a David Firth cartoon: rusty iron foundations jut outward over a polluted lake.

This sinister atmosphere is compounded by the electronic music of P J Harvey which at times was reminiscent of the electro-funk in the Midnight Run soundtrack, and at times was distorted and aggressive and could have belonged on a Nine Inch Nails album. The incongruence is effective. It generates a surreal tone, the kind we get in a dream where things don’t fit together properly and we know something must go wrong.

Go wrong it does, but not in the way the director Ian Rickinson perhaps intended. In the second half, the play collapses in a paroxysm of physical theatre and shouting that is almost unwatchable.

The main issue, to regurgitate my previous analogy, is that the relationship between the parents is about as believable as the affairs of two Sims, arguing about showerheads, empty fridges and puddles on the floor. Caricatures don’t make interesting characters. The only impression I got about the parents was that the father worked too much and the mother was too worried about money. Their dialogue was accordingly dull and although there were rare moments of black comedy - the father’s defiant “there is a lot more to life than mental health” received the biggest laugh – even the jokes felt trite. Here lies the crux of the problem with The Nest. If you don’t believe the characters then the play’s climactic tragedy, in which the newborn is unknowingly bathed by his mother in a lake full of toxic waste, becomes unbearable to watch. The mother’s hysteria feels contrived. The father’s mea culpa descends into a tedious ten minute pantomime of wailing and hand wringing. There is nothing more boring for an audience than to feel apathy while actors on stage enjoy having emotions. Paring down the manufactured drama might have served the The Nest better; less is more. Like the stricken child of The Nest, this performance might have been resuscitated if only the director had understood this.

Yet the play is not a complete failure, and however histrionic The Nest may be, the moral lesson is not lost. Poverty is a rough beast, it drives us to dangerous and irrational decisions. It drives us to exploit the world around us, and make no mistake, whatever harm we do to the environment in our lives will be reciprocated tenfold against generations to come.