Robin/Red/Breast review – frights and folklore with a mesmerising Maxine Peake

Light on her feet … Maxine Peake (Norah) and Tyler Cameron (Robin) in Robin/Red/Breast. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian

John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast is one of those episodes of Play for Today that is rooted in its era. It is a quintessentially 1970s mix of stagey acting and on-the-nose social issues (cohabitation, contraception, abortion), spiced with a creepy infusion of English folklore. It is idiosyncratic and unnerving, and you can see why they call it a precursor to The Wicker Man. The plot follows Norah Palmer, a TV writer who retreats to the countryside where the locals’ interest in paganism seems to go beyond the harvest festival. All evidence suggests they are after her firstborn.

The episode is little enough known to allow the collaborators of new company Music, Art, Activism and Theatre (MAAT) to take it in their own direction. Writer Daisy Johnson is less interested in the cultish horror than in what these folk traditions say about women and motherhood. If the name Norah reflects the proto-feminist Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, here – with the story stripped to its earthy fundamentals – the character has as much in common with the transgressive leads in Strindberg’s Miss Julie or Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. On stage, the woodsman Robin (Tyler Cameron) is a voiceless object of pure lust, while Nora (Maxine Peake) follows her primal sexual instincts.

From her opening salvo about menstrual blood to a scene with a mothers’ support group, Johnson explores the physical and emotional impact of childbirth. For all its dreamlike fluidity, however, her monologue is more poetic than dramatic. Not only does it deny us a sight of the villagers in all their disturbing oddness but, severing itself from the source material, it grows ever more elliptical and hard to pin down.

Peake, though, is compelling, as impassioned as she is light on her feet, and director Sarah Frankcom, working with movement director Imogen Knight, builds a mesmerising production around a central six-sided stage where Lizzie Clachan’s skeletal cottage is eerily lit by Lizzie Powell. There is a section played on headphones and, best of all, a brass band in virginal white skirts and blood-red tunics. They are otherworldly onlookers, their music, scored by Gazelle Twin, at once ancient, familiar and strange.