Darkling review – Stranger Things’ Linnea Berthelsen confronts a gruesome Indian disaster

Ominousness permeates Darkling. In Titas Halder’s dramatic monologue, we witness a young girl’s coming of age set against the backdrop of the 1984 toxic gas leak in the Indian city of Bhopal, an environmental catastrophe that remains one of the worst industrial disasters in global history, leading to thousands of deaths.

Actor Linnea Berthelsen – best known for her role as Kali in Netflix series Stranger Things – makes her UK stage debut and gamely takes on the singular role in a tightly wound, physical performance. Leaping across Simon Kenny’s artful, soil-filled set, Berthelsen embodies childlike wonder as she recounts her early years playing in the rain, savouring bowlfuls of plain rice and idolising her older sister.

So far so good. Except, alongside her emotional growth, the silhouette of a new factory rises in the background – effectively portrayed by lighting designer Rajiv Pattani’s projection – foreshadowing the calamity to come. When it eventually arrives, we hear of the horrors she witnesses, stepping over maimed bodies, facing blinded relatives and breathing in toxic fumes, all relayed through increasingly frenzied description.

Herein lies the main issue with Darkling. By using a monologue format – especially one where our narrator is never dramatically questioned – all the audience receives are streams of poetic description, a barrage of words that never feel emphatic or adequate enough to match the gruesome scale of such a tragedy. Coupled with Halder’s uneven pacing, which lingers in childhood for too long before alighting on trauma and then descending into a hectoring denouement that places the blame for the disaster on individual shoulders, Berthelsen is faced with a gargantuan task to maintain a sense of dramatic tension.

As Matthew Xia’s production draws to a close, with a strangely repeated narrative beat that equates female worth to motherhood, you are ultimately left feeling that this is a tragedy told without the requisite horror. Darkling is a worthy reminder of an often-overlooked disaster – but one that may well fail to take root in the mind.