'Hunger' review or 'Nourishing theatre'

Hunger, from Knut Hamson's novel 
Arcola Theatre, 25th November 2019
Written for The Guardian 

This play about a writer who moves to the city to find a job – and quickly finds himself very poor and running out of options – cuts deep. There’s an urgent empathy about Fay Lomas’s production that mimics the jolting intimacy of Knut Hamsun’s first-person novel and swiftly and skilfully draws the audience in. We’re shown the world through the writer’s eyes as his hunger deepens and his senses begin to turn on him. It’s a frightening place to be.

Amanda Lomas’s excellent adaptation is finely crafted yet never imposes itself; there’s still a lot of space for the creative team to find their own (mesmerising) rhythm and theatrical language. We watch a nameless lad from the country, played with heartbreaking optimism by Kwami Odoom, desperately try to stay afloat. At first he merely struggles to pay for a round at the pub but then the landlady comes knocking and it isn’t long before our writer is out on the street and pawning his blanket for cash.

Comedy cameos from the brilliant ensemble cast – Archie Backhouse, Katie Eldred, Jessica Tomlinson – keep things fairly light and it’s only very gradually that the city turns on our writer. There’s always hope until, quite suddenly, there isn’t. Lex Kosanke’s playful score teases us with the promise of something better just around the corner and there’s great work from movement director Natasha Harrison, who keeps the small cast moving in one direction and the writer in another. The production slowly warps and darkens as the hunger takes hold. Characters kiss, eat and satiate themselves in slow motion as the writer looks on, out of time and out of luck.