An enthralling modern fable told through an experimental theatrical approach.
You walk into a set resembling an ordinary living room, complete with sofa and chairs. Looking up, you see bouquets of dried flowers hanging upside down from the ceiling. This liminal space, suspended between the living and the dead, is where Maggot takes place.
Maggot, a new play by Farah Najib, tells the story of a group of loosely connected neighbours who are forced to confront an unusual situation unfolding just beyond their front door. The play places a set of highly distinctive yet relatable characters into a social experiment, through which it reveals a modern fable of loneliness, indifference, and the fractured nature of human community in the contemporary world. It begins with something small: a strange, unfamiliar smell with a hint of sweetness. People cannot look away from it, yet no one is willing to investigate its source.
The writing is exquisite. For a play told primarily through narration, the storytelling remains surprisingly gripping throughout. Najib’s language pulses with rhythm, conjures a rich and visceral sensory world, and sustains a deeply unsettling metaphor.
Unlike traditional plays, in which actors inhabit characters who in turn inhabit the space, Maggot asks its three performers to narrate the story largely from the outside. The narrative becomes an object, almost like a piece of cloth, passed between the actors. At times they wear it, momentarily becoming the characters, while at others they observe them from a distance. This unconventional approach to storytelling is executed with great skill by Safiyya Ingar, Marcia Lecky, and Sam Baker Jones. Ingar’s performance in particular repeatedly draws the eye, as they infuse the narration with vibrant energy while remaining convincingly grounded in each fleeting character they inhabit.
Rather than rooting itself firmly in the performance space, the storytelling in Maggot becomes intangible and fleeting, drifting through the room like a ghost. On the surface, this choice expands the possibilities of theatrical storytelling, creating the sense that everyone present, actors and audience alike, could be one of the characters in the story, observing but never intervening.
However, the staging and direction does not seem to fully realise the potential of this narrative strategy. Although the actors continually move through the space and rearrange the furniture to suit their needs, these actions do not appear to add additional layers of meaning to the story being told. As a result, the visual elements run largely parallel to the text. This raises the question of whether Maggot, as a theatrical work, might function just as effectively as a radio play. When the story exists primarily in narration rather than in physical space, the dynamic of watching and being watched, which is central to theatre as a form, begins to feel less essential.