Review: Nurture, Hope Theatre

Nurture is a tightly coiled hour of psychological thriller, playing at the Hope Theatre

“Don’t pretend you have any idea what it is like”

Playing as part of the Hope Theatre’s Write Club Festival 2025, Jacob Ethan Tanner’s Nurture doesn’t do much to dispel any January blues. It might open with a young man giving us choice cuts from his Jokes for Kids book but the tone soon darkens as we switch to a mother making a desperate appeal to help finding her missing son and things only get darker still from there as a keen journalist reaches out to help. 

What becomes clear is that each of the three characters have experienced major trauma but crucially, they’ve dealt with it (or not, as the case may be) in very different ways. Events from the journalist’s past connect with what is happening in the mother’s present and a strange bond emerges between the pair, effectively played by Miles Henderson and Gabi Martinez, exploring the notion that it is sometimes easier to open up to strangers rather than close ones or professionals like a therapist.

Looming large in both their lives though, at first figuratively and then later very much physically, is that young man, his early charm curdling into something truly disturbing, a psychopathic need for attention from both characters and audience. Sam Stafford sells this well in the intimacy of this space, garnering hugely inappropriate laughter at one key point, even as he chills the spine with his manic energy.

With just over an hour to play with, the script takes a couple of short cuts – a few too many one-sided phone calls and improbable contrivances (how did the young man get the mother’s number? the journalist answering a call in a therapy session?). But Tanner’s direction also introduces interesting choices – that crucial phone call for the mother playing out as the young man stalking her is viscerally effective and the relentless plunge into dark territory is well judged given the subject matter, this isn’t the time for happy endings.

Running time: 70 minutes (without interval)
Photos: Jacob Ethan Tanner
Nurture is booking at the Hope Theatre until 23rd January

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