A blooming hit in an English country garden
Albion (Almeida Theatre) Verdict: Pulsating drama ★★★★✩
WHAT a refreshing surprise to visit North London’ s Almeida Theatre — one of the more sniffily metropolitan of venues — and find a play which is not only set in rural England but also has plenty about gardening. The thrust stage has been turned into an Oxfordshire lawn and a smallish oak tree stands at the back wall.
This being the Almeida, mind you, the lawn belongs to a seven-bedroomed house called Albion which has just been bought by a London retail millionaire called Audrey. Oh well, at least we’re outside the M25 for once.
Audrey (played with a piercing insistence by Victoria Hamilton) is dynamic. Audrey is difficult. As she strides about her new acres in designer gumboots and tight trousers, Audrey knows how to run a business, but she is less good at staying on friendly terms with her nearest and dearest, such as pouty, spoilt daughter Zara, who is in her early 20s.
Audrey’s soldier son is dead, having been killed in Afghanistan. she has bought back this grand house, which her family owned in the Twenties, in part to turn its garden into a memorial to him. Her decision to scatter her son’s ashes on the lawn upsets his grieving fiancee (Vinette Robinson).
shakespeare’s Richard II has a scene which compares a garden to the kingdom at large. The same symbolism is found in this pulsating new Mike Bartlett play, which seeks to ram home some slightly clumsy analogies about Brexit, rotting flowerbeds and doddery British yokels being upstaged by thrusting outsiders.
Here we have this once-busy executive who has chosen to try to live in the delusional past of Albion rather than stay in fashionable London.
Audrey is told her renovation plans for the house will all be a disaster, but she blithely says: ‘We need optimism, fighting talk!’ shades of Boris Johnson. Mr Bartlett’s play is, happily, more than just the latest take on current politics. The plot gives us tensions between Audrey and her unmarried friend Katherine (Helen schlesinger) after Zara starts to heroworship this sneery novelist.
THEN there are difficulties between the townie interlopers and the villagers, plus further aggro between those villagers and an entrepreneurial Polish cleaning woman who is undercutting them and working twice as hard.
The first half of Rupert Goold’s production hurtles along, a droll comedy of modern middle-class manners, depicting the determination of Audrey to wrench a long-neglected house back into shape. The staging is bright and occasionally interrupted by stirring pop music. Look out for a scene when pot plants are put into flower beds while still in their plastic pots (oops!).
The second half lacks the same pace, the energy becoming smothered amid an overwhelming pessimism. Can Audrey survive financially and emotionally? Will the different generations ever talk to one another again?
At his best Mr Bartlett is a great observer of hesitant conversation and modern social niceties. It is a pity he is quite so glum and that the direction of the play becomes obscure. Was he trying to echo Chekhov or was he succumbing to anti-Brexit wish-fulfillment?
Alongside Miss Hamilton’s remarkable performance and some Gooldian coups de theatre there’s good support from Nicholas Rowe as a lazy husband and Luke Thallon as a would-be student who takes a fancy to Audrey’s daughter.