Neil LaBute is the most popular American playwright since David Mamet. He first came to the public’s attention with his 1997 film debut, In the Company of Men, a story of two corporate businessmen, who decide to seduce the sweetest girl they can find. They choose a defenceless secretary, who is deaf and has a speech impediment.
The title of his latest play suggests things are also going to be pretty Grimm and LaBute fans will instinctively brace themselves for something really nasty; but they will be bitterly disappointed. In A Forest Dark and Deep doesn’t feel like a LaBute play at all. It’s just another thriller. A storm is brewing. Thunder is heard. The lights flicker.
Matthew Fox and Olivia Williams play a brother and sister who have a love-hate relation which borders on incest. She is a college lecturer, who lives in a log cabin and she is having an affair with one of her students. He is a racist philistine who has been through two abusive marriages and is disgusted by her promiscuity and boasts of his moral superiority. The audience waits for them to either have sex or to murder each other or both. Fox and Williams do a lot of shouting. Truth hurts, he says. The truth is the play is not very good and the denouement is obvious long before the end.