★★

“a script that adds in too many complications, subplots and locations”

My first reservation about seeing a staged version of The Monkey’s Paw, was that it’s not an easy story to adapt into a play. Iconic and chilling in its simplicity, the short story, first published in 1902 by W. W. Jacobs, follows an English couple, Mr and Mrs White, who come into possession of a mummified monkey’s paw. The paw grants them three wishes, but each with a horrifying catch. Their wish for £200 is granted through compensation for their son’s workplace death; his mother’s wish for him to return becomes a knock at their front door, with terrifying implications as to what lurks on the other side.

This play, devised, written and produced by Infinite Space Theatre, opens with that climactic scene: Jenny White, played by Josephine Rogers, clutches the monkey’s paw, desperate to open the door to her son; John White, played by Steven Maddocks, knows better, and looks on in horror. As the play winds back to the beginning, you wonder how Infinite Space Theatre, and director Leah Townley, have managed to pad out this straightforward fable about being careful what you wish for to the 80 minute runtime, especially with only two actors on stage. The answer is a script that adds in too many complications, subplots and locations for the simple, static set and limited props to handle, creating a sense of confusion that sullies the play’s potential to move or terrify.

It’s a shame that the action falls victim to awkward staging, because the set itself is original and well-designed by Hannah Williams, making great use of Hope Theatre’s small space by furnishing two perpendicular walls with the Whites’ washing lines and curtains. The sound design and lighting design are also well-executed by Peter Michaels and Alex Forey: the change in atmosphere at the paw’s first granting of a wish is particularly well realised, although it would have been nice for the knocking at the door during the play’s opening and climax to be done live, to add more of a meta creep-factor.

Other plots are weaved in to the original tale to add meat, including an alternative origin story for the monkey’s paw, discovered inside an anonymous mummified-child whose tomb museum archivist/supervisor John later tracks down in Egypt. We also hear a story of infant death from Jenny’s own childhood: both these additions are clearly supposed to augment the loss of a child at the story’s core, but just give the plot a cobbled-together feel. That being said, the latter is relayed with the most genuine depth and sensitivity of the play, and is Rogers’ best performance moment amid the overall impression that herself and Maddock slip into overacting in order to fill up the small space.

Where the play falls shortest is its interpretation of Herbert, the Whites’ son who falls victim to the paw’s cruel sense of irony. In this play, Herbert is a cloth baby who Jenny becomes attached to after losing two pregnancies, but it’s not immediately clear that boy isn’t real, given the symbolic way Jenny’s genuine miscarriages were represented earlier in the play. When she wishes for the boy to be real, he reemerges as a terrifying-looking puppet, taking a Chucky-style bite out of John’s hand, but otherwise remaining inert, apparently still not a genuine child. When the Whites lose their ‘son’, the prospect of his return, not as in a human corpse, but as a mangled cloth puppet, depletes the sense of horror that the story’s climax relies on. This convoluted change, as well as the awkward, overlong staging of the door-knocking scene itself, is disappointing.

Unfortunately, a bloated plot and some confusing transitions muddy the deep sense of parental loss and visceral horror of the unseen that makes the original story such a bitter and disturbing tale. Perhaps this production proves that ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, like the titular object itself, should be left well alone.

THE BRIDE AND THE GOODNIGHT CINDERELLA

Queen Elizabeth Hall

★★★★

“it finds the core of you and squeezes as hard as it can”

About midway through her performance at the Southbank Centre, Carolina Bianchi climbs onto a white table, closes her eyes and falls asleep. This is not feigned sleep, or naturally incurred exhaustion: Bianchi has taken a sedative, known in Brazil, her native country, as ‘Goodnight Cinderella’, a date rape drug which will render her unconscious for the rest of the performance.

The first chapter of Bianchi’s ‘Cadela Forca’ (Bitch Force) Trilogy, The Bride and The Goodnight Cinderella is a relentless, harrowing exploration of rape, femicide, and their intersection with female performance art. Addressing the audience in a white suit with a microphone, Bianchi walks us through a legacy of violence, from the dismembered young woman and twisted moral of Giovanni Baccaccio’s ‘La historia de Nastagio degli Onesti’, to the emulative real-life torture and killing of Eliza Samudio at the behest of the now released footballer Bruno Fernandes de Souza.

Bianchi introduces herself as writer/director of the piece, speaking in Portuguese with accompanying subtitles, paintings and photographs projected onto the white screen behind her. But she is not the protagonist: the play is, as she describes it, a ‘resurrection’ of the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, who was raped and murdered while hitchhiking through the Balkans and the Middle East in a wedding dress for her project ‘Brides On Tour’.

In her attempts to understand Pippa Bacca’s motivation, to finish the story wiped from her camera by the man who killed her, Bianchi does not seek to simply martyr, aggrandise or condemn. She resents the performative fragility of the white bride, she is biting in her rebuke of the idiocy of blind faith, but at other times she calls out desperately to Bacca, as if to a lover. Once she takes the Goodnight Cinderella, there is unbearable tension in anticipating her eventual collapse. We will her desperately to unearth something, to rest on some finite interpretation of Bacca’s sacrifice before she falls unconscious.

What comes next begets a different kind of anxiety, as Bianchi’s sleeping body is placed in the care of the rest of the company, Cara de Cavalo, the white screen and any through-line narrative falls away to reveal a black stage, a black car and an atemporal, nightmarish second segment. The audience are left in vulnerable freefall, unable to anticipate the next confrontation, the next recounted horror.

The company explores themes of voyeurism, sexuality and perversion through a combination of physical theatre, poetry and dance. The car, unnerving in its still, vacuum-like blackness, becomes the site of simulated violence, sex and invasion. Although Bianchi is indebted to the female performance artists before her, not only Pippa Bacca, but Regina Jose Galindo, whose piece ‘La Siesta’ became the inspiration for her ingestion of the date rape drug – the performance, even while she lies unconscious, watched, undressed, manipulated by the company, is revealed to be arrestingly personal.

It’s a play that determinedly asks more questions than it answers: Can art borne from trauma be restorative, or are we sticking fingers deeper into open wounds? When do women breach the boundary of acceptable risk with their art? Would this question ever be asked of men? In its gratuitous descriptions and depictions of sexual violence it demands us to bear witness to our own perversion: it finds the core of you and squeezes as hard as it can.

Bianchi’s performance insists that a rape cannot be tied up in a lesson, or the full circle of healing; it is a tumorous, insidious thing. “Decipher me or I will devour you,” Bianchi recalls as the false dichotomy of the Sphinx in Oedipus Rex. It feels as if by watching the performance, we witness Bianchi, in the throes of cognizance, being eaten alive.

THE MONKEY’S PAW

Hope Theatre

★★

“a script that adds in too many complications, subplots and locations”

THE MONKEY’S PAW

Hope Theatre

Reviewed on 23rd October 2025

by Emily Lipscombe

Photography by Cam Harle

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE MONKEY’S PAW

THE MONKEY’S PAW

THE MONKEY’S PAW

THE BRIDE AND THE GOODNIGHT CINDERELLA

Queen Elizabeth Hall

★★★★

“it finds the core of you and squeezes as hard as it can”