Walden, Harold Pinter, review: the West End takes a giant leap as the stars shine again

The Earth has gone round the sun, and a bit round again, since the Harold Pinter Theatre was last open. Covid shut down Sonia Friedman’s production of Uncle Vanya in March last year. Now, after a torrid time for the West End’s biggest producer, she’s re-opening the doors with a trio of new works under the season heading: Re:Emerge.

Chekhov’s late-19th-century play of rural ennui and mid-life disillusion presciently speculated about the deterioration of the environment in the future, its eco-worrier credentials impeccable.

By neat symmetry, Walden, by the American playwright Amy Berryman (the first of the Re:Emerge batch), is set in a “not-so-distant future” where climate change has seemingly reached a point of irreversible calamity. You think things are bad now? A news announcement overheard at the start offers a sobering update on a Sri Lankan “mega tsunami”: a million feared dead and another 10,000 seeking refugee status in India, itself overwhelmed by “the war over potable water”.

The gut reaction of some people venturing back to the theatre might be: jeez, we came all this way for a doom-fest? Mind you, those hoping to attend on Tuesday evening didn’t even get that far – the show was pulled at the last minute owing to a false alarm concerning one of the cast being told (over-zealously) to self-isolate by a film production Covid officer, causing a spasm of confusion and knee-jerk ultra-caution.

In a way, though, that panic-button incident offers the best retort to those who think this is "the last thing we need". Let’s not pretend we’re not jittery, let’s in fact embrace the odd way in which hypothetical talk about the overwhelming challenges facing our species has started to feel tangible. There are urgent debates to be had, and here they crystalise in an intense confrontation between two scientifically gifted siblings.

In a log cabin, amid a sizeable patch of wilderness balmily less toxic than much of dystopic America, Gemma Arterton’s Stella readies for the arrival of Lydia Wilson’s Cassie, her twin. Arterton often brings a luminous glow to her performances and here that’s apt – Stella is readying to announce her marriage to Bryan (Fehinti Balogun). But her smiles when Wilson’s watchful, more wan-looking Cassie arrives – lugging a backpack – have a false brightness. She’s sitting on a welter of resentments.

Cassie (named after the constellation Cassiopeia) is one of Nasa’s shining stars – a botanist just back from achieving a terra-forming breakthrough on the Moon (their astronaut father would have been so proud) and bound for Mars, to help mankind build a colony away from its done-for home. Stella, by contrast, is a Nasa architect who dropped out, and has made that a badge of pride – pinning humanity’s survival on the “Earth Advocacy movement” to which Bryan belongs; better to spend resources here not on pie-in-the-sky dreams, is their line.

The piece crams a lot into 90 minutes and doesn’t achieve complete lift-off. Ian Rickson (who directed the Vanya) musters an appealing air of wooded seclusion but the make-or-break reunion calls for a touch more tension, less soothing birdsong.

The pair waver a little conveniently or confusedly in their stances, drawing out the drama but dissipating it too as if Berryman realises the stark either/or scenario (ad astra or stay put) doesn’t quite stack up. It feels plausible that Cassie would express doubts about the sterile, lonely one-way trip ahead, and that Stella (whose colony design, "Walden", named after Thoreau’s 1854 manual of self-sufficiency, is in demand at Nasa) might not be totally luddite. Yet the way Cassie moves in a matter of heartbeats into the romantic orbit of Balogun’s laidback (underwritten) Bryan doesn’t fully convince.

And yet I was still hooked: the actors’ commitment to the scenario can not be faulted. Grievance glints in Arterton’s eyes along with withheld tears; Wilson suggests a mislaid inner life and yearning for sisterly approval beneath the self-possession. Beyond that, there’s the near-alien (it has been so long) wonder of watching three actors, three bodies in space, building an imaginative terrain for us just with words and expressive physical interplay. Underpinning the project, too, is the ovation-worthy ambition of exploring what life is like now, in our brave new, sadder, post-Covid world: one small step for playwriting, then, one giant leap for theatre’s rebirth.

Until June 12. Tickets: 0844 871 7622; www.atgtickets.com