Apex Predator: This dire vampire drama lacks bite

Telegraph

01-04-2025

Down in Southwark, at the Menier Chocolate Factory, they're presenting Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors – which is styled as a gender-bending, Gen Z spin on Bram Stoker's vampire classic but has its emphasis, winningly, on pure silliness.
Up at Hampstead, by contrast, we're offered something ostensibly meatier to sink our teeth into. John Donnelly's Apex Predator collides the model of a vampire thriller with a domestic drama about a young mother buckling under modern-day stresses.
So: genre-bending, then. Initially, we're presented with the portrait of a woman, Mia, who's showing signs of being stuck in a post-natal horror-show: it's not just the anti-social behaviour, especially noisy neighbours upstairs, that is grinding her down, but aside from a hungry babe-in-arms, there's her disturbed 11-year-old son Alfie (facing exclusion for biting another child) and a husband unhelpfully absent working at nights on a police case.
The focus at first seems to shift towards Alfie, with his sinister drawings and curious wariness around his mother. But his primary-school teacher, Ana – who has taken him under her wing – leans in, literally, towards Mia, bizarrely offering to breast-feed the baby and proffering coaxing advice: 'Maybe you've just lost touch with the animal part of yourself'. Before you can say 'ouch', a drip-drip gore-fest, primarily at the expense of a rancid male sex that deserves what it gets, is the order of the night.
What with the huge success of 2:22 A Ghost Story – not to mention an insatiable public craving for vampire-fodder recently stoked anew by Nosferatu – you can see why Hampstead leapt on a show with a supernatural (and thus commercial) edge. But while Blanche McIntyre's production seduces technically – with some icky sanguivorous flourishes – Donnelly's drama feels curiously de-fanged.
The secondary characters are so disposable as barely to warrant attention. And while on paper, he succeeds in drawing us into a twilight world where we, too, are unsure what's in Mia's head and what lies without, in practice, the piece feels like an interesting conceit that hasn't been fully fleshed out. A twisty ending tries to have its cake and eat it, serving both to indicate Mia's maternal distress and re-assert a teasing sense of dark unleashed forces.
With short scenes lending the metaphor-laden evening a televisual (yet theatrically cumbersome) choppiness, Sophie Melville turns in quite a flat performance, almost in keeping with Tom Piper's ungainly set with its rising and falling sections of frosted panels and unprepossessing scaffolding. She's more starey than scary, and isn't helped by having to jiggle a plainly fake baby, although her quivering bouts of 'blood lows' are nicely done. The brightest element is Laura Whitmore – the Irish TV presenter and actress – as the predatory primary-teacher with carnal longings and immortal leanings. She has presence, and unmistakable glamour.
The piece apparently draws on Donnelly's own grasp of the complex challenges thrown up by the protective urges of parenthood. But given that it's still evidently taking its baby steps, it needed cosseting itself in a less exposed part of the theatrical food chain, ideally in the studio space.