The notices are in for Darkling, Titas Halder’s solo play set in Bhopal before and after the 1984 gas leak, with Linnea Berthelsen carrying ninety unbroken minutes as the girl who grows up in the shadow of the factory. On the performance there is little argument: the critics find her tireless and affecting. Where they part company is the play itself. Some are held by the density of Halder’s language and by Matthew Xia’s staging, with Rajiv Pattani’s lighting and Beth Duke’s sound singled out more than once; others find the evening slow to reach the disaster and relentless once it arrives.
The verdict: eleven reviews in so far – one five-star notice, five four-star, one at three and a half, three at three, and one outlet that publishes no rating. Across the ten that score it, the average is 3.8 out of 5, and every one of them praises Linnea Berthelsen’s solo performance, even where the length of the piece is questioned.
What are critics saying about Darkling?
London Theatre Reviews
“A devastating story, powerfully told”
Reviewer: Kay Johal
“Berthelsen is outstanding. She moves effortlessly through different ages, memories and emotions, taking the audience from moments of humour and hope into scenes of genuine devastation. By the end, audience members were in tears and Berthelsen herself was visibly emotional.”
BroadwayWorld
Reviewer: Cindy Marcolina
“Berthelsen is gloriously tragic. Alone on stage, she gives a remarkable, tireless 90-minute solo performance, going from childlike innocence to mature understanding, shifting her physicality and calibrating her energy levels accordingly. In turn effervescent or frantic, she fills the space with an open-hearted personality. Yet, there is a lingering bitterness in her portrayal.”
LondonTheatre1
Reviewer: Chris Omaweng
“There’s another play waiting to be written, if it hasn’t been done already, about the local community’s generation-long struggle in the disaster’s aftermath. This one, however, seeks to understand one person’s perspective and trajectory, and in doing so, there’s something personal and relatable about watching someone who just wants to live their life but encounters multiple obstacles along the way. A harrowing and intriguing account of a young woman’s struggles in the face of much adversity.”
All That Dazzles
“A haunting portrayal of the Bhopal disaster, brought to life by poetic writing, striking design and a captivating performance”
Reviewer: Ruth Sealey
“Linnea Berthelsen is captivating as ‘She’, bringing breathless delight to her youthful nature at the start of the play. Despite no costume or make-up changes, she is completely believable as she transforms throughout the journey from girl to adult. Berthelsen plays multiple characters, and the most affecting is the boy she falls in love with: cricket-loving, awkward and with genuine affection for each other. However, not all of Berthelsen’s characters are so easy to differentiate, and they occasionally merge into one another and require more clarity to increase their impact on the story. Even when the play loses momentum, Berthelsen finds a way to reignite it, raging at the system that allowed this disaster to happen and confronting the audience with its consequences. It is exhausting to watch, and she commands the space and demands that we listen, and the audience does just that. As she reaches the end of her story, the raw power of Berthelsen’s performance feels deeply affecting.”
Love London Love Culture
“But this is a play that does require a strong performance that can ensure that the audience feels every emotion and change in tone as the story changes. Linnea Berthelsen (Stranger Things) delivers a wonderful performance, really capturing the changes in the character as she grows up, while portraying the other characters that ‘She’ encounters impressively. There is a real rawness to the performance that grabs and holds the attention of the audience from start to finish. Berthelsen dashes around with great verve and purpose – although sometimes the way she ends up positioned on stage can mean that at various times, some of the audience may miss some of what she says.”
Susan Elkin Reviews
Reviewer: Susan Elkin
“It’s a one-woman performance with Linnea Berthelsen as the central character who is never named. Berthelsen is a remarkable actor with a wide range who comfortably depicts every character she presents and who uses the Bush’s quite large playing area with lithe fluidity. As a child “I am seven” she’s lively and charming. As bereft adult who has lost everything (a relative term) she is weighty, moving and looks twenty years older although she never leaves the stage. This play must be a challenging feat of stamina and the final ten minutes is a tour de force. On the other hand she and her director, Matthew Xia have not quite mastered the Bush’s acoustic and Berthelsen’s words are often lost particularly when she’s doing anger or distress and speaking quickly. At the end when it’s anguished despair and she remains in one place speaking slowly we hear every word and there’s a lesson to be learned here.”
LondonTheatre.co.uk
“Linnea Berthelsen makes a committed London stage debut in this catastrophic drama”
Reviewer: Matt Wolf
“Berthelsen honours the material with a rigour that must be a real workout for her body, and she conveys the tenuous grip that this child-woman comes to hold over the grief and danger with which she is confronted at every turn. The play reminds us that the world at large can be a fearsome place without itself landing the knockout emotive punch that might send us furious and fretful out into the night.”
The Reviews Hub
Reviewer: Jane Darcy
“Titas Halder’s language is interesting, the script laid out like poetry, with short lines and a degree of repetition which give it a sense of elevation. But it’s the overall tone that is difficult. Berthelsen’s performance is immaculate and the story of the Bhopal disaster an urgent one. Halder’s decision to refract it through the eyes of a single character is admirably bold. But there comes a time before the 90 minutes are up when it feels a bit like listening to the Ancient Mariner, and there is little director Matthew Xia can do to vary the intensity.”
Liam O’Dell
Reviewer: Liam O’Dell
“With that being said, Berthelsen displays remarkable skill with her voice and accents, and her early intonation as a younger She not only conveys the natural excitement expected of that age, but brings about an urgency to monologues. When compared to the steadier, more pensive observations later in the piece when disaster strikes, it not only conveys her character’s maturity, but the shock and sheer scale of the catastrophe in which she finds herself.”
Time Out
“This drama about the 1984 Bhopal disaster is devastating when it reaches the events themselves, but is too slow to get there”
Reviewer: Anya Ryan
“Berthelsen has a big job bringing the web of characters in Bhopal to life. But the distinction between them isn’t always clear. As her delivery gets faster, her words blur together, and it becomes difficult to make out what she is actually saying. With no set around her, we rely solely on her performance to build the scene – it isn’t always strong enough.”
Production photographs by Alex Brenner.
Also reviewed by: The Stage (Holly O’Mahony, four stars, “Vividly drawn”), whose review sits behind a registration wall; its rating is included in the average above.
For more of what the critics have been saying this season, see our other London theatre review roundups.
Darkling is booking at the Bush Theatre until Saturday 24 October 2026, before a UK tour to Birmingham (30-31 October), Oxford (3-4 November) and Manchester (11-14 November).
