nut

The young dramatist debbie tucker green  absolutely refuses to give interviews – that staple of cultural coverage – despite having won plaudits and awards for earlier work including born bad and random. Her second assault on the conventions of journalism is that she prefers both her name and the titles of the plays to be printed entirely in lower-case letters on programmes, posters and in reviews. Which brings us to nut, her first play for the National Theatre. As is usually the case with her work, she has also chosen to direct this 75-minute, interval-less chamber piece for seven actors, although the precise number and nature of the characters is one of the many ambiguities of the piece. The only person who can unequivocally be described as real is the protagonist, Elayne (Nadine Marshall), a ­thirtysomething black woman who, it soon becomes clear, is being treated with anti-depressants for problems that include self-harm and possibly agoraphobia.

Elayne lives in a drab flat, where she refuses to put any batteries in the doorbell. This may be symbolic of her reluctance to admit visitors or alternatively a signal that no one ever comes to see her and that the conversations she has are with psychotic fantasies or visions.

The callers – real or imagined – include Devon (Anthony Welsh), a young black male who is especially distressed by the absence of a doorbell, and Aimee (Sophie Stanton), a white woman who considers herself a friend but seems to irritate Elayne. In the sparky opening scene, they have an argument over the eulogies they would like delivered at their funerals. Elayne also seems to have – or at some point to have had – a sister. This sibling is seen in the middle section of the play in a bitter dispute with her ex-husband over the failure of their marriage and access arrangements to their daughter. A young boy, Trey, also wanders across the stage between and during scenes, singing with haunting beauty.

On the press night, Trey was played by  an impressively confident Tobi Adetunji. The boy may be Elayne’s son but is largely ignored by the other characters and so, if I know my semi-realistic theatre, is almost certainly either dead or a projection of a child that was adopted or aborted. The sister and her ex – whose rows are played with painfully convincing love-become-hate by Sharlene Whyte and Gershwyn Eustache jr – appear in scenes that don’t include Elayne and this may be taken as evidence that they have an existence independent of her. However, it’s possible that the main character is remembering or imagining the life of a relative she doesn’t see.

Whatever the explanation, the uncertainty is diverting, and the opaque structure gives a convincing sense of a mind in flight from either real or imagined human encounters. I preferred the more concrete social realism of green’s random, a monologue about the murder of a black teenager, and truth and reconciliation, which depicted peace processes. But the writer’s hyper-realistic dialogue – with the fragments and overlaps of real speech – is again a pleasure and, along with the impeccably naturalistic acting, more than makes up for the play’s occasionally frustrating refusal to explain anything.