little scratch. New Diorama Theatre.

Director Katie Mitchell’s little scratch is a vital, astonishing, and unmissable piece of theatre. Adapted from Rebecca Watson’s debut novel by Miriam Battye, the work first appeared to rave reviews at the Hampstead Theatre Downstairs back in 2021. This revival at Euston’s New Diorama Theatre has lost none of its extraordinary impact.

The show follows a single Friday in the messy existence of an unnamed office worker, from her awakening, hungover, blood under fingernails from scratching in her sleep, to her descent into post-coital slumber a dozen-and-a-half hours later. In a seemingly relentless torrent of language that draws little distinction between internal and external dialogue we follow her from shower and toilet, to crowded commute, to her dreaded desk at her dreaded job, to an evening with the boyfriend she loves but does not trust. Like a kind of modern day Mrs Dalloway, the uncomfortable realities the character shields herself from, specifically the intrusive memory of a brutal rape at the hands of her boss, constantly spring into consciousness. There is a manic, almost psychotic feel to this woman’s inner life. It is a realm of supressed rage, uncertainty, and contradiction. Her thought processes, most viscerally her inner bargaining around her desire to self-harm, are laid out in gruesomely evocative detail. “Stop! Stop! Stop it” she screams to herself at one point, before disassociating off into a childhood memory. The feeling of being alone in someone else’s chaotic, cluttered, wounded mind has rarely been this well communicated on stage.

The ensemble of four, clad in black and hands at their sides, stand at microphones as if in a radio studio. Aside from handling an occasional prop, they rarely gesture or even move. This is director Mitchell’s trademark uber-naturalism, on steroids. Waves of words undulate up and down the line, sometimes repeating or intersecting, sometimes delivered in choral harmony, sometimes abruptly tailing off into frigid silence. It is a kind theatrical artfulness that feels more like music; a rough approximation might be listening to the rhythmic structure of a Philip Glass composition, with words in place of notes. Very occasionally the artifice threatens to interfere with the message – there is a temptation sometimes to marvel at how the director is doing all this rather than focus on what the character is experiencing. That is a minor gripe about a major piece of work.

Cast members represent no specific emotional aspect of this woman’s mind; this is not a case of a differentiated id, ego, and superego. But having four actors share the delivery of what is essentially a monologue is a highly effective tool for communicating the fluidity and flux of her thought processes. As Whitman might say, she is large, she contains multitudes; there are many personalities in one here, some collaborating, some competing, and some determined do her down. “What if the feeling of purposelessness keeps rising” she demands of herself, at a particularly self-destructive moment.

The character has a single choice to make over the course of her Friday, which is whether to divulge to her boyfriend the details of her rape. Iterations of the refrain “I have been raped” shoot through her brain with increasing, distressing frequency as the day draws on. Mitchell is thankfully careful not to put these words in the mouth of the single male cast member (a superb Ragevan Vasan), but this can still be an uncomfortable watch. Fortunately, there is humour here too. The character’s meandering morning online features a delightfully funny encounter with a pompous TripAdvisor restaurant review. An evening at a poetry reading reveals some of the most comically cliched verse imaginable.

Eleanor Henderson, Rebekah Murrell, Eve Ponsonby form the remaining members of the pitch-perfect ensemble. Ponsonby is particularly strong in capturing the character’s rapid shifts, “alone inside her head”, from fragile self-doubt to furious anger. Melanie Wilson’s soundscape is packed with the minutiae of commuting life, from insistent calls and the ping of texts in the background to the sounds off tube doors swishing shut. Her eloquent musical score injects an atmosphere of ethereal menace at just the right moments, without ever being intrusive.

little scratch is unlike almost anything else you may have seen before. It is an essential, indispensable brilliantly executed coup de théâtre from a director at the peak of her form.

Writer: Rebecca Watson, adapted for the stage by Miriam Battye

Director: Katie Mitchell