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, and only Everything Theatre demurs, and then at the over-worked opening rather than the whole. 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: twenty reviews in so far – two five-star notices, nine four-star, one at three and a half, six at three, one at two, and one outlet that publishes no rating. Across the nineteen that score it, the average is 3.7 out of 5, and almost all of them single out Linnea Berthelsen’s solo performance; where the critics part company is over Titas Halder’s script, which the lowest scorers find repetitive and unfinished.
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.”
Theatre and Tonic
Reviewer: Bronagh
“Berthelsen is instantly engaging and captivating to watch. She bounds around the minimal wooden stage and the surrounding earth with the energy of a young child as she starts her story in the Bhopal slum. Berthelsen plays numerous characters with no outfit changes, simply using her physical and vocal acting skills, morphing between them all with little effort at all. She moves seamlessly through different ages, locations and emotions, making the audience laugh and cry. It’s impossible to take your eyes off her.”
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.”
View from the Gods
Reviewer: Simon Jenner
“Berthelsen – mostly known for her Netflix Stranger Things appearances – is both a compelling performer and one who seems to relish immediacy. Simon Kenny’s set consists of a stark tiled rectangle surrounded with fine brown particles and a few removable reveals: the last most telling. Upstage is a scumbled blank on which Rajiv Pattani’s lighting matches mood in strikingly different guises.”
Afridiziak Theatre News
“Linnea Berthelsen delivers an energetic and engaging performance”
Reviewer: Mark Arbouine
“Darkling is not an easy watch, nor should it be, but it is much more than a play about tragedy. At its heart is a deeply human story of family, childhood, loss and survival. Linnea Berthelsen delivers a remarkably assured performance, while Titas Halder and Matthew Xia have created a production that succeeds in making a huge historical event feel personal and immediate. It is a powerful reminder that behind every statistic are individual lives and stories, and sometimes telling just one of those stories is enough to make us understand the enormity of them all.”
A Young(ish) Perspective
“A striking tribute to the victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster”
“Matthew Xia’s direction and Anjali Mehra’s movement direction shines here. When Berthelsen transforms into the characters She meets along the way, her physicality is deliberate and world-building. Xia masterfully creates a production that can feel busy and bustling, but also can point to She’s loneliness and isolation. The set is a particularly strong component of this. As a thrust stage, there is a central, elevated island surrounded by a moat of dark dirt. The elevated stage offers She water, fire, and paint from below its brick slats, which is a brilliantly symbolic example of the play’s repeated celebration of human connection to the earth.”
London Living Large
Reviewer: J.C.
“Berthelsen gives a compelling performance, convincingly capturing the young woman’s changing emotions, youthful aspirations and growing awareness of the harsh limitations imposed by her circumstances. Her portrayal moves effortlessly between innocence, humour, fear and despair, giving the character a vivid emotional life rather than allowing her to become merely a symbol of the disaster. As the community is destroyed and lives are lost in the carnage of the gas leak, her grief becomes intensely personal, and the performance is powerful enough to leave members of the audience visibly moved.”
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.”
The Guardian
“Stranger Things’ Linnea Berthelsen confronts a gruesome Indian disaster”
Reviewer: Ammar Kalia
“Herein lies the main issue with Darkling. By using a monologue format – especially one where our narrator is never dramatically questioned – all the audience receives are streams of poetic description, a barrage of words that never feel emphatic or adequate enough to match the gruesome scale of such a tragedy.”
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.”
Everything Theatre
“An intense and incredibly important act of remembrance with a few teething problems”
Reviewer: Matilda Beaumont
“Once the narrative shifts to the factory disaster itself, the play really flies, and Berthelsen comes into her own. Her anguish and fear are remarkable, made all the more real by the smoke pouring from the bricks that form the floor of the stage. Halder and director Matthew Xia find a compelling balance between narrative, and demands for remembrance and accountability.”
Pink Prince Theatre
“A dazzling design and a drifting mind”
Reviewer: Neill Kovacic-Clarke
“Carrying the weight of this heavy narrative is Linnea Berthelsen, making a highly anticipated UK stage debut. You might know her from Stranger Things, but out here on the dirt-covered stage, she is utterly captivating. She bounces around with the breathless, frantic energy of a child at the start, and then seamlessly shifts her voice and body to play multiple characters with zero costume changes.”
Read Neill Kovacic-Clarke’s full review at Pink Prince Theatre
WhatsOnStage
“The Stranger Things actor makes her UK stage debut in this world premiere solo play by Titas Halder”
Reviewer: Alexander Cohen
“Titus Halder’s Darkling weaves this real-life environmental catastrophe into a folk tale for the age of post-globalisation. The breathless monologue traces how far the tendrils of neo-liberal exploitation reach, creeping into the developing world to strip its resources but blind to the consequences of its rapacious greed. There is an urgency that bleeds off the stage, but it feels like a work in progress. Frustrated by stunted writing, Darkling doesn’t penetrate beyond the surface level of its ideas.”
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).
