A woman named Brenda, convincingly portrayed by Joanne Hildon, sighs in the front room of her seaside boarding house: “Imagination. I wish I had that. Imagine.” It is a tribute to, or an echo of, Beckett’s famous, “A world without imagination. Imagine.” This clue is one of many in a ostensible whodunnit by a playwright who would later mesmerise audiences with scenarios involving Marilyn Monroe explaining relativity to Albert Einstein (“Insignificance”) and Salvador Dali confronting Sigmund Freud with surreal nightmares (“Hysteria”). Another clue is the title, “Imagine Drowning”, which brings to mind another Beckettism, from “Krapp’s Last Tape”, “Sat shivering in the park, drowned in dreams and burning to be gone.” Krapp somehow achieves the impossible: sitting, shivering, drowning and burning all at once. Terry Johnson manages to bring the moon to earth; shows a wife in search of a missing husband realising she doesn’t need to see him; and putting on stage without sympathy a man in a wheelchair – then revealing the heroism of his refusal to be nice or to surrender to the victimhood of paraplegia.
     A young journalist named David Sinclair arrives at Brenda’s boarding house to meet wheelchair-bound lodger (or accomplice), Tom, who’s promised David a huge demonstration against the nuclear power station at Sellafield. David’s editor suddenly orders him to Cornwall to cover Margaret Thatcher opening a motorway. David calls a friend and asks him to report Thatcher for him, so he can stay in wait for Tom to deliver the real story that will put him on page one – police confrontation with local citizens angered by the long-term effects on themselves and their children of Sellafield’s nuclear spill-over into the air and sea.
      Meanwhile, Jane comes into the boarding house, which is a menagerie – a cockatoo, a hamster, a fish in an aquarium and other small creatures who, like man, have climbed out of the primordial mulch. She is looking for her missing husband, Sinclair. Played beautifully by Stephanie Goodfellow, Jane is the worried spouse whose man has disappeared. He may have been murdered by the residents of this strange house, or he may have drowned in the nuclear-polluted sea. The rest of the play goes back and forth between the time David was there and the time Jane spent in his footsteps looking for him, with Tom, Brenda and her demented son Sam dissembling to both man and wife.
      Back to David’s time in the provincial sitting room, his editor sacks him over the telephone for having filed on a motorway opening that did not happen. David’s friend sent the story in his name without going to the photo opportunity; yet Thatcher was taken ill, so there was in fact no opening. Worse, the big event David thought he was covering at Sellafield was a one-man demo by Tom in his wheelchair, an event so routine that Tom is arrested and released by the police almost every week.
      If Tom’s outrage seems trivialised by the fact everyone ignores it, it should not be. Terrible things, as Tennessee Williams says in “Orpheus Descending”, have indeed happened as a result of the local hellfire – in this case from the nuclear power plant. And their effects explain why Brenda is hiding in her little boarding house, eking out an existence as a landlady and unable to imagine having an imagination. Jane in the meantime ceases to wonder whether her husband fled or drowned. Her insight is the gift of a kind of Stage Manager (à la Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”), a beachcomber named Buddy. When asked by Jane where he’s from, he says, “From Montana via the moon.”
      Johnson himself called “Imagine Drowning” “a sort of dream play about the pain we're all immersed in.” Or in which we are all drowning and burning. This excellent production of a work by a brilliant playwright early in his career, acted by young players of talent, is worth a trip to Islington, a drink in the pub downstairs and a walk up a flight of stairs. The West End should offer as much.
Charles Glass