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in a forest drak and deep billington
Matthew Fox as Bobby and Olivia Williams as Betty, paired for In a Forest, Dark And Deep at the Vaudeville. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
Matthew Fox as Bobby and Olivia Williams as Betty, paired for In a Forest, Dark And Deep at the Vaudeville. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

In a Forest Dark and Deep - review

This article is more than 13 years old
Vaudeville, London

You never know quite where you are with Neil LaBute. As he has shown in plays such as The Shape of Things and The Mercy Seat, he's a moralist who seems to delight in depicting human cruelty and in hoodwinking an audience. And in this highly entertaining, 100-minute two-hander he pulls the rug from under our feet so often that we end up feeling breathless.

The play starts, intriguingly enough, with a sibling encounter in a midwestern cabin during a violent storm. Betty, dean of a liberal arts college, has asked brother Bobby, a jobbing carpenter, to help her shift piles of books left behind by a student tenant. And, as Betty and Bobby bicker and quarrel, one is struck by the difference between them. Betty, married with two kids, is a self-conscious intellectual while Bobby appears to be a crude philistine who at one point asks if the tenant was gay because he read the New Yorker. But, when Bobby accidentally discovers an incriminating picture of Betty with the student, all our assumptions are thrown into reverse.

What LaBute is writing about is the elusiveness of truth and the deceptiveness of appearances. Bobby, for all his sexism and racism, turns out to be a fierce puritan. Betty, on the other hand, is an instinctive liar. But, while it's good to have our assumptions overturned, I am always a little suspicious of plays where it's dangerous to reveal too much of the plot.

Great drama does not depend heavily on narrative suspense. But LaBute's play starts by echoing the sibling intensity of Sam Shepard's Fool for Love and ends up resembling Ira Levin's Deathtrap. As the revelations keep tumbling out, you feel that LaBute is not so much exploring Betty's inability to face reality as taking the audience on a theatrical rollercoaster ride.

If the ride remains enjoyable, it's partly because of the quality of the performances. Matthew Fox, best known for his appearance in the TV series Lost, is ferociously good as Bobby. With his sharp crew-cut and trim beard, he bears an odd resemblance to the playwright David Mamet. And he's almost like a Mamet character in his blend of tough, blue-collar virility with sudden bursts of emotional sensitivity.

Above all, Fox persuades you that, for all the character's simmering resentment of his status-conscious sister, he loves her profoundly.

Olivia Williams also shifts admirably from abrasive snootiness to desperate neediness; and, although Betty regards truth as something to be avoided, Williams has the priceless ability to let us see exactly what is going on under the character's adopted masks.

I have no quarrel with the superb acting, with LaBute's own skilful direction or with Soutra Gilmour's pine-cabin set. I simply feel that there is something contradictory about LaBute's desire to attack our endless capacity for self-deception and his palpable delight in manipulating an audience.

Until 4 June. Box office: 0844 412 4663

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