Linnea Berthelsen. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
★ ★ ★ ★
Review by Simon Jenner, September 16 2026
A seven-year-old girl with a shining dawn face gazes out over blue sky and a city of lakes. Barely a decade later she describes herself as “withered” with hope gone. Titas Halder’s latest one-person play takes us through the American-made Bhopal disaster of 1984 and its aftermath. A predicted explosion on the site of Union Carbide (India) of Methyl Isocyanate killed nearly 4000. Over 22,000 more would die too, as well as the gas causing countless early deaths, non-births, deformities and cancer. Darkling premieres at the Bush’s main Holloway Studio. Directed by Matthew Xia it’s a co-production with Actors Touring Company, till October 31. After which it tours the UK.
Photo credit: Feruza Afewerki.
Linnea Berthelsen. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
Though ‘She’ (Linnea Berthelsen) is a lone figure on stage, this is a family. A loving father recalling his wife wanted to raise their children out of these mud existences. There’s two daughters. Only the father can warn them though they’re living under a shadow. They move, then because of their “uncle” turning predatory they return. Not before local boys taunt the girl for her dark skin. Is this all they can look for?
Berthelsen – mostly known for her Netflix Stranger Things appearances – is both a compelling performer and one who seems to relish immediacy. Simon Kenny’s set consists of a stark tiled rectangle surrounded with fine brown particles and a few removable reveals: the last most telling. Upstage is a scumbled blank on which Rajiv Pattani’s lighting matches mood in strikingly different guises. Above all a projected bulking frame half articulates its menace on occasion. The blue of alpha-rhythm childhood, querulous yellows and leads and off-whites. With shadowing there’s a city whose elegy this is. Beth Duke provides a gaunt soundscape of iron and metallic construction as well as menace and hubbub. It’s studded with Niraj Chag’s haunted composition. And there’s sinister use of dry ice, clinging to the vents below.
Yet nearby “the skeleton is fast becoming a huge steel structure. They have built a behemoth here.” The girl wonders at it. The father scowls. The girl has to draw water from a farther, muddier well. The world, class, even race, close in. That’s just the start as She befriends a boy over many years. There’s a rhapsodic lightness and emotional possibilities rush in: just as the world determines She will have nothing more, can never be the scientist she wanted to be. That’s the good news.
Except one extended scene: a figure brought in quite early, is also gasping. But he’s not really deserving of help He symbolises the boss or bosses of Union Carbide, smarming, making every excuse, and finally hunted down with a skirl of righteous anger. It’s good to know in Halder’s world at least, and with she, such figures can be pursued beyond the grace and at least through their dreams. It’s powerful, and though little can heal, full of a sad and angry consolation.
Halder’s gaining a reputation for one-person plays freighted with such rippling and biting language that you feel words are the characters Halder’s actors interact with. The characters’ displacements and reckonings can be ferocious. Foal for instance with just such a hulling bosy born out of words and diaphragm, played to acclaim at the Finborough as recently as June.
Linnea Berthelsen. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
Darkling though is different. The canvas despite the apparent narrow bounds of family gradually fans out and the set’s dark rises. Halder always finds the language for this. As interchanges lift versicles there’s a fine lattice of text, often litanic. Then he switches to labyrinthine lines slithering to serpentine descriptions. They seem to pull the narrative’s people back as they flee them.
The title itself though typifies Halder’s layered and oblique approach. The unnamed She is stigmatized as a kind of dark-ling, lowest of the low, identified through her dark skin. But it’s a wordplay too on something very different, the quotes the word chiefly lives in. “Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death.” By the end of seeing Darkling that might resonate more. And after Keats, Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ the word used just in the title. Something withered “aged”, but still singing. Even in this devastation Halder teases out something: Western cultural assumptions. But they’re subordinate: there’s a sober playfulness of language and tone throughout.
Earlier Anjali Mehra’s movement seemed a little foursquare: literally, as Berthelsen ran round the stage perimeter, sometimes scampering as a child might. Later though this solidifies into a potent maturing and tragic slowing of purpose. Movement gains a terrible weight.
The latter 20 minutes of this 90-minute play do drag a little. Some judicious editing would help it. Berthelsen compels even here and keeps you transfixed. Halder clearly needs to point up those post-disaster nodes of hope and work them through to new epiphanies of terror and the faintest hope. Halder night continue on this path but I hope he can amplify the stage with more than one brilliant voice at a time.
The end though is the most shattering to a one-person play I can remember for a long time: bleak, lyrically ferocious to the bone and singing. As if someone has come across someone’s femur, fashioned a flute and let it tell their story. Unmissable to anyone who takes an interest in India or the world’s recent history, ongoing late capitalism and how it stops humanity in cyanide tracks.
Casting Director Shaheen Baig, Voice Coach Zabarjad ‘Budgie’ Salam, Associate Director Sara Aniquah Malik, Production Manager Daniel Steward, Costume Supervisor Tash Prynne, CSM on Book Nikita Bala, ASM Chloe Broke, Relighter and Production Electrician Stevie Carry, Production Sound Engineer Joel Clements.
Photo credit: Feruza Afewerki.
Linnea Berthelsen. Photo Credit: Alex Brenner
As does the ever-quickening tempo of the narrative, often cab-driven as it were, as connections between characters begin to form: like white-hot filaments or those illuminated chains, that bind in another way too. Ambrose, Pipe and Smith are all equally superb. Smith enjoys the greatest diversity, as beyond Bex and Gigi she’s Twix too. Additionally Smith introduces a Deus ex machina character towards the end, who could have been semaphored – if only glancingly – a couple of times before.
Movement Director Rose Ryan ensures this is a boppy and wild a performance on the floor as you can fit in the Little. There’s a disco beat where David Lewington’s sound morphs from ambient traffic through to techno-clubbing with bass as Jack and Tia, or Tamara and Gigi, get some partying and sightseeing in.
Is the ending a little too uplifting? Deaths arrive not quite where you’re led to expect them, though there’s dark too. And a satisfying pay-off nearly everywhere. It’s a thrilling ride as scenes flick and segue on a head-twist. Wilkinson delights in denser textures than Union, with more actors, and the velocity of his stagecraft is exhilarating. This paean to the mass of gig workers who slave in precarity to make London buzz 24/7 is timely, personal, and a battle-cry with nuance: not easy to bring off. The late Mark Fisher wrote in 2009 at the dawn of the gig economy his manifesto: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? He’d be pleased to see the emphatic answer here.
Casting Director Fran Cataneo Production manager Emma Langan, Stage Manager Venus raven, PR Gingerbread Agency, Marketing Cup of Ambition, Producer Clarisse Makundul.