As New Farm Nash Theatre’s penultimate production for 2025, Veronica’s Room invites us into an off-kilter world of imagination and manipulation, uncertain whose lens we view through, that blurs boundaries between sense and psychosis, understanding and identity. The evening begins innocently enough, after a chance meeting between a seemingly kindly older couple with a younger pair, which leads them all to Veronica’s Room. The Woman (Ellie Bickerdike) and The Man (John Stibbard) remark on an uncanny resemblance between The Girl (Al Bromback) and the late Veronica, who passed away some 35 years prior; The Girl and her date The Boy (Alex Thompson) agree to join the older couple to see a photograph of her doppelganger, ultimately agreeing to take part in a well-intended deception, where The Girl will pretend to be Veronica for the comfort of Cissie, Veronica’s elderly, bewildered and terminally-ill sister.
However, day turns to nightmare quickly thereafter, and no good deed goes unpunished as the cast guide us with deft duplicity through a complex, confronting and callous plotline; We soon learn the pretence behind the invitation is misleading, and that The Girl’s performance of Veronica is not intended for the audience she expected; We then question whether or not there is any performance, given her dates’ earnest confusion and concern, as he offers a very different ideation of their acquaintance, challenging concepts of self, sanity and subjectivity.
Al Bromback is beguiling as The Girl, bringing a natural presence, crystalline diction and an impressive inclination for accents, to a very sympathetic and fluid character portrayal. As the Woman, Ellie Bickerdike is agile and tenaciously terrifying in a character of derailed deviance, reminiscent of Kathy Bates’s iconic portrayal of Annie Wilkes in the film Misery. John Stibbard offers fine range as The Man, caustic and leering but with perhaps an ambivalent semblance of conscience, too. Alex Thompson brings nuance and skittish subtlety to his performance as The Boy, thus making his character’s ultimate revelation even more chilling.
We are unclear which side of the locked door The Man and The Boy are on; Are they complicit conspirators, or pawns to this perversity? No easy answers are given, with the fantasy maintained until the end, where the cast forgo the traditional curtain call for a final look at the audience still in character, sending us away with unbroken sense of suspense and unease.
An admittedly dark and disturbing drama, Veronica’s Room marks another creative triumph for New Farm Nash Theatre, and a most successful foray by Director Susan O’Toole Cridland away from her recent theatrical diet of comedy and farce. As a whole, the production delivers in abundance, complementing the Theatre’s thoughtful and eclectic 2025 lineup, with themes as compelling as they are creepy. A challenging, uncomfortable, unmissable experience.
To book tickets to Veronica’s Room, please visit https://nashtheatre.com/play-3-2025/.
