How to Hold Your Breath at the Royal Court Theatre, London SW1

5/5

What happens next if you have sex with a devil? Some may have metaphorically been there at one time in their lives and subsequently wish they hadn’t.

But Zinnie Harris is for real in charting the apocalyptic consequences in her hallucinatory play, directed by Vicky Featherstone, where fantasy and reality explosively interact.

Set in anonymous European locations, How to Hold Your Breath opens with Dana (Maxine Peake, pictured) and Jarron (Michael Shaeffer) waking from a one-night stand.

It seems they’re about to make the beast with two backs again but Jarron — a “powerful” man who works for the UN — has to be somewhere on the Adriatic soon and, despite Dana’s tender advances, prepares for a hasty exit.

Before he does, he not only offers to pay her for sex (“You’re a businesswoman, after all”) but also reveals that he is in fact a devil — “didn’t you notice my semen is black?” he inquires.

The archetypical male chauvinist pig, his sense of diabolical propriety will be compromised if their night of passion isn’t paid for in hard cash, an offer which Dana refuses and continues to do so as Jarron nightmarishly reappears throughout the course of the action, hoping to pay her off.

That indignation at the reduction of meaningful human relationships to a mere financial exchange sets the scene for what follows.

Dana, it turns out, is pitching for a research fellowship in “customer dynamics” and, in an acutely comic sequence, she sells its premise to the interviewers for the post: “You might in the same second get a text from your partner and then from your bank... should the text from your bank feel more on your team than you bank? It is your bank, here to listen to you...”

Offered a second interview in Alexandria, she sets off on what turns out to be a nightmarish train journey with her pregnant sister Jasmin (Christine Bottomley) but not before seeking out books on “what happens if you piss off a demon” from an avuncular librarian (Peter Forbes) who, a well-intentioned foil to the diabolic Jarron, returns to haunt her throughout as he proffers useless guides, among them How to Survive an Economic Disaster.

As the sisters travel across the continent, capitalism enters a phase of terminal collapse. Europe’s banks are running out of money, possibly Jarron’s revenge for Dana’s refusal to accept the €45 he’s meticulously calculated as a fair price for their night of passion.

What then follows is a dystopian scenario as the financial glue which binds European “civilisation” together melts as the two sisters struggle to survive. The consequence, as Harris persuasively and graphically illustrates, is a dog-eat-dog nightmare.

Eventually ending up in a war-ravaged Mediterranean city Dana, in an ironic twist, resorts to the “customer dynamics” of prostitution to help her dying sister and raise the money to get to Alexandria.

But, in a neat inversion of the scenes so familiar on TV of “boat people” from north Africa desperately seeking passage to the European continent, Dana perishes along with other refugees in a powerfully staged capsize.

Resurrected by Jarron, Dana at the conclusion begins her presentation in Alexandria with a deep intake of breath.

But we suspect that, as on the boat, she won’t be able to hold it long enough to survive in a world where our sense of “what it is to be human” has been sacrificed to the cash nexus.

That image, in the climate of a continent where economic collapse is by no means implausible, is what makes Harris’s dark vision far from fanciful.

A must-see.

Runs until March 6, box office: royalcourttheatre.com