Rating: ★★★★★
Lights went out, mouths paused mid-conversation, and screaming ensues as a young woman is launched across the empty doorway of a rustic farm-house. She stumbles inside and cowers, followed by her hardened mother in a dark, blood-covered jumpsuit, clutching a rifle.
This was the first night of The Hunger at the Montgomery Theatre for Open Works Festival. The jaw-dropping post-apocalyptic horror follows two women – Deborah and Megan, played by Elinor Coleman and Hollie Burgess respectively – stranded in the Yorkshire Dales and clutching at survival with their bare fingertips. Food is scarce, windows must be shut at night, and a mother teaches her child how to kill her… if she is ever to catch the disease.
A revamped production of Black Bright Theatre company’s debut show, The Hunger, has been performed at Edinburgh Fringe Festival twice. Both productions, in 2023 and 2026, received fantastic reviews and an incredible audience response… and it is very clear why.
From the beginning, these actors wholly dedicated their entire bodies to telling this brutal story, not shying away from the realistic, grimy realities their characters face. The audience is constantly in shock; half is felt for each development of a twisted and morally complex mother-daughter relationship, but the other half is simply for how far the actors are willing to push themselves to physical extremes. Vivid portrayals of lengthy puking, choking, panic attacks, screaming and force-feeding showed a formidable commitment from both actors – who carried the whole show on their backs with very little rest offstage – in order to bring this bleak world, and the fierce female-led story inside of it, to life for audiences.
The play is crafted so that your imagination is a character itself, making you just as struck by what you don’t physically see as what lies in front of you. This is achieved by off-putting sound effects from Mark Fenton and snap lighting changes by Zidi Wuy and Yanni Ng that worked creatively with the blurry-yet-transparent walls of the farm house. The resulting crawling tension and jump-scares accomplished many thrilling, visible frights throughout the audience.
The plot, written by Madeleine Farnhill, was satisfyingly dense and incredibly gripping – just as you began to jump ahead to figure something out, an earlier moment would unveil itself to be the cause of such gut-punching horror. And, without spoilers, their final reveal felt crippling as an audience member, leaving us in gaping, dumbfounded shock as the lights came back up.
Image Credits: Black Bright Theatre
