Out of the Woods review – bitten by the big bad wolf

Each week through these Covid months the National Theatre of Scotland has been releasing tiny, sharp digital dramas under the title Scenes for Survival. Brian Cox plays Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus. Janey Godley (and dachshund) appears in her own not-much-missing-my-dead-husband piece. Elaine C Smith is subtle in a Val McDermid play – niftily appearing in front of a bookcase with a McDermid thriller.

The three-parter Out of the Woods is a nastier kettle of fish. And an exhilarating departure for online monologues, which have in the main been elegiac or mournful, looking backwards or forwards or inwards. Johnny McKnight’s snarling, witty script is driven by plot – and by the sinuous abilities of Alan Cumming, an actor who makes drollness look like a specialist branch of the diabolic arts.

Directed by Andrew Panton, Cumming is seen – in goatee and puffa jacket – stumbling, lost, through woods (in fact the Catskills, where the actor lives). He is looking for the cabin in which his infant daughter is living with her “other daddy”, his former, much-resented partner. In video messages he twinkles at the child like an indulgent dad, but it is soon apparent that something sinister is going on. His visit, he tells her, is to be “our little secret”; the first episode closes with a deep voice humming “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?”

Gradually, the fairytale pieces drop into place: there is a granny, a little red hood, a big knife – and a door that creaks open with terrible slowness. Yet each step is enlivened by 21st-century jokes – granny needs to have the difference between human and animal bears explained – and by the sardonic swivels of Cumming’s face. He is, of course, alone, though he points out that (you have to be there) his real-life husband puts in some “really great feet acting”.