Theatre Review: The Nightmare Room

The Nightmare Room is a play adapted and directed by John Goodrum from a classic short story by Arthur Conan Doyle.

A tense psychological drama that examines the breakdown of a friendship between Catherine (played by Sarah Wynne Kordas) and Helen (played by Corinne Begluk) fighting for the affections of the same unseen man - David who is married to Catherine whilst he continues an affair with Helen. They play a deadly game, in a locked room, which one will survive?

I really enjoy the dynamics of two-handed play. There's something very interesting about the format. With just two performers carrying an entire production, there is nowhere to hide, either for the actors or the material. And tonight's extremely sparse set puts even more expectation on the performers to create the world around them.

The play takes us through different periods and situations in the women's relationship, shifting between friendship, hostility and the breakdown of relations. There is an interesting idea at its heart, but it's not examined deeply enough.

The play is non linear and at times the writing makes the time changes harder to follow than they need to be. One particularly strange sequence, in which the characters are shown as children with the actors using baby voices just feels silly. We are told that these women have known each other since childhood, but the script doesn't always do enough to make us feel that history, only peeking into moments from university days and their working lives.

That is perhaps the play's biggest weakness. The characters never quite develop into fully rounded people. And as they are both fairly contemptible the audience doesn't really care about what happens to them. 

For a contemporary play centred entirely on two women, it is also worrying how completely their lives revolve around a man. David may be unseen and only heard occasionally but he is at the centre of the story and is the catalyst for virtually everything that happens, while the women themselves are given little independent identity beyond their relationship with him.

And that creates an irony: putting two women alone on stage together is, on the face of it, an interesting and powerful decision. Yet the script, written by a man, doesn't always give them the distinctive voices or perspectives that might have made it more compelling. 

Furthermore the repeated use of the word b***h is another questionable choice. Clearly the women are in competition with one another and it's said mostly in a jokey way, but it's not progressive. 

There are plot twists as the balance of power shifts between the two women before the final revelation concerning David. These developments certainly keep the plot moving, although they aren't necessarily as surprising as the play seems to think. The audience is generally one step ahead.

As mentioned, a two-hander is a demanding format and it shows. Kordas and Begluk from the Classic Thriller rep team don't really do it justice. I didn't find them to be believable. They're playing at a heightened level of emotion - going through fear, anger, sadness and a myriad of other feelings and emotions... yet it didn't seem real and felt a bit too amateur dramatic for me.

The end result is a play with an intriguing premise, that misses the mark with hackneyed writing and mediocre performances, falling short of being memorable, or saying something genuinely interesting.

The Nightmare Room is showing at Nottingham's Theatre Royal from 18-22 August 2026.