Never mind the blooming B-word…
‘ONE of the great garden plays,’ was one ecstatic comment I heard in the toilets. As Albion runs its course, a long, looping border is planted with heaps of flowers: a foreign sight to a central London audience.
First staged here in 2017, it came hot off the heels of the EU referendum, and is back again, just as a new uncertain decade gets under way. But don’t run a mile! This isn’t a Brexit play.
Mike Bartlett (also responsible for Doctor Foster on TV) has pulled off one of the most difficult feats in playwriting. Albion is a state-of-the-nation play buried in a perfectly funny and thrilling drama, with no clunky topical references or unravelling theses.
Heritage is the centrepiece, but potted all around the edges are passionate stories of motherhood, grief, love, lust, ambition (and the lack of it), as well as ageing and belonging.
The outstandingly watchable Victoria Hamilton plays a wealthy businesswoman from London, who returns to the quiet countryside to restore, from ruin, a grand home and ornate garden she remembers from her childhood.
It’s also a culture she wants to revive — romantic England. The set grows sumptuously, and withers, as Neil Austin’s chunky beams of light push us right round the seasons, and Hamilton gushes about the sense of legacy we’ve lost.
Meanwhile, her family and friendships crumble, and it’s gripping. The scenes with her wayward daughter (the sweet Daisy Edgar- Jones) are touching, and her confidences and arguments with her best friend (the brilliantly louche Helen Schlesinger) are fierce.
But the brief moments where an actor in army uniform drifts in — the memory of her recently killed son — almost finished me off.
Hamilton gives the performance of a lifetime as a sharp mother concealing a boiling heart. With stiff competition, she’s the best Hamilton on the London stage.
Director Rupert Goold has choreographed the most dynamic show, with its fights on the lawn and terrifying warzone deaths. Don’t miss this play in full bloom before it inevitably finds its place on the curriculum.