Robin/Red/Breast review – frights and folklore with a

Aviva Studios, Manchester
Daisy Johnson adapts a 1970 TV play into a poetic and disturbing exploration of childbirth’s physical and emotional impact

John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast is one of those episodes of Play for Today that is rooted in its era. It is a quintessentially 1970s mix of stagey acting and on-the-nose social issues (cohabitation, contraception, abortion), spiced with a creepy infusion of English folklore. It is idiosyncratic and unnerving, and you can see why they call it a precursor to The Wicker Man. The plot follows Norah Palmer, a TV writer who retreats to the countryside where the locals’ interest in paganism seems to go beyond the harvest festival. All evidence suggests they are after her firstborn.

The episode is little enough known to allow the collaborators of new company Music, Art, Activism and Theatre (MAAT) to take it in their own direction. Writer Daisy Johnson is less interested in the cultish horror than in what these folk traditions say about women and motherhood. If the name Norah reflects the proto-feminist Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, here – with the story stripped to its earthy fundamentals – the character has as much in common with the transgressive leads in Strindberg’s Miss Julie or Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. On stage, the woodsman Robin (Tyler Cameron) is a voiceless object of pure lust, while Nora (Maxine Peake) follows her primal sexual instincts.

At Aviva Studios, Manchester, until 26 May