Shoe Lady review, Royal Court: Katherine Parkinson is brilliant in this sickeningly compelling play

A relentless capitalist work culture abstracts everything around Viv, the shoeless woman at the centre of this production by EV Crowe

Parkinson relishes the text, playing with it like putty, voice tremulous, always just on the cusp of breaking (Manuel Harlan)

★★★★☆

There’s more than a touch of Beckett to Shoe Lady. Starring the excellent, brittle Katherine Parkinson as Viv, the shoe(less) lady, EV Crowe’s newest play is a queasily existential piece of work.

Viv is a modern, middle-class woman unmoored. Quite literally – she’s an estate agent who’s staggering through her day, having lost one of her shoes. Caught off balance, she attempts to regain some semblance of control, hobbling out of her house to a shoe shop, a café, her son’s birthday party – but most pressingly, to work. Viv is terrified of losing work. “I get so scared about how close we live to not being able to live,” she confesses. “It’s incredibly hard not to sink to the bottom.”

Crowe’s text has a dissonant musicality to it. Full of odd, discordant rhythms, it lilts like a nursery rhyme before tripping itself up with bouts of fevered repetition, often embellished by Matthew Herbert’s aggressively tinkling piano interludes. Any singsong, fairy-tale charm quickly wears away as it all becomes pretty (deliberately) hellish.

Parkinson relishes the text, playing with it like putty, voice tremulous, always just on the cusp of breaking. She hobbles with Herculean effort on an increasingly bloodied foot, plastering a Cheshire cat grin on to her face. “It hurts, it hurts, but it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright that it hurts,” she murmurs like a mantra. A relentless capitalist work culture begins to abstract everything around her, making everyday objects enormous and uncanny – a pair of curtains chastises her in a booming baritone; glowing purple shoeboxes surround her; a tree begins to spout wisdom.

Other people float in and out of focus – her mostly silent husband, Kenny (Tom Kanji), her nameless son (Archer Brandon) and Elaine, a homeless woman who looms like a spectre, played utterly deadpan by an excellent, if underused, Kayla Meikle – but they’re more like cardboard cutouts than real people, all squeezed through Viv’s increasingly distorted perspective.

Director Vicky Featherstone’s production teeters on a precipice – fitting, for a play so concerned with precarity. It never fully indulges in a stylised, high camp aesthetic, nor dives head first into the darkness simmering under the surface. Instead, Featherstone maintains an appalling sense of purgatory as Viv treads water, desperate to keep her head afloat. Chloe Lamford’s coolly angular design reaches deep into the stage’s inky depths, stranding Viv in blank space, forcing her down a seemingly unending travelator which pulls her back and forth with nauseating regularity.

Couple that with Natasha Chivers’ stark lights, which pin Viv down like a beetle under a microscope, and the overwhelming impression is that of a system which is not just indifferent, but actively hostile. And yet Viv still smiles. “I haven’t done anything wrong,” she says. “Not on purpose. I’m a worker. That’s me.”

Shoe Lady is many things – obtuse, unsettling and stressful, to say the least – and it will not be to everyone’s taste. But there’s still something oddly, sickeningly compelling about peeling back the plaster, only to find the blister underneath.