Absurdist play is new ground for Doña at CFT
In a neglected garden, small talk oscillates between the weather, the neighbours, reminiscences of friends and family and anecdotes of past exploits in love and war.
But this quintet of characters, with their foibles and failings, are not what they seem to be, and nor is their home. And overhead, the clouds are gathering.
The play is Home by David Storey which will play in Chichester’s Minerva from October 8-November 6.
Doña, who plays Marjorie, is delighted to be back on stage for the first time in two and a half years: “In lockdown I did a few radio plays from my front room. The equipment arrives and you have to make sure it is all Covid free and you then set it up. I did two radio plays like that. One was a series actually. And then just as lockdown finished, I did a couple of films.
“But the last time I was on the stage was at The Globe in 2019, March or April in an allfemale production of Richard II. I was John of Gaunt. I am not sure how it will feel going back, but this play is just marvellous. It is the kind of theatre that I really wanted to do, absurdist theatre. It is very funny but it is also a very human play. David Storey seems to know a lot about the human condition and how we operate with each other. To start with, you don’t know who all these people are or where they are. I haven’t done a Storey before, but I knew the name. When I was very young in the business, he was like a John Osborne character. Those guys at the Royal Court were the centre of new writing.
“In this play I love the fact that he writes obliquely. Nothing is explained to the audience. Nothing is on the nose. You have to keep up and you have to listen. A lot of plays these days and certainly TV have become very obvious. The audience will just be led through a narrative.
But Storey really makes an audience think about how we live in the world and how delicate people are in the 20th century and also now in the 21st century.
“My character is somebody… well, I don’t give her a specific event for her mental state. It just is. If you give somebody a particular event, there are things that would keep referring back to the event, but she just has this particular condition. It is not post-partum depression or anything like that. It is just that some people do spend their whole lives battling.
“I just see her as someone who her whole life has just had to try to stop the ground beneath her feet from shifting beneath her. When she goes off balance she doesn’t land for a long time. I think of her as someone who is trying to balance in the world.”
And in that respect she will resonate today, postpandemic. Doña likens it to the celebrated speech which she delivered as John of Gaunt: “That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”
As she says, it is not often a Shakespeare speech draws applause, but this one did with all its Brexit echoes when she delivered it. So too will people see elements of what we have all been through in Home, Doña believes.
So in a sense, Storey is ripe for recovery from his relative obscurity: “Every generation has to produce its own stuff, but there are elements here that are very apt for our times now. And I have always wanted to do absurdist theatre. It’s the kind of thing that isn’t done very often. And I have done everything else. I have done Shakespeare. I have done comedy. But I have never done anything like this.”