Domestic bliss blown to bits as yuppies collide
THE HOUSE Caustically witty drama ★★★★✩
ATWo-TIME Fringe First winner, American playwright Brian Parks has had some notable hits – and this domestic hyper drama is the perfect showcase for his lacerating, surreal, rapid-fire humour. Albeit, there’s not much plotwise, and it lacks the political edge of some of his work.
The setting could not be more domestically blissful. Here a perfectly average, white middle-class American couple, the Redmonds, (Pauline Knowles and her dentist husband, played with customary charm by David Calvitto) have decided to downsize now that the kids are off to college.
Their house is more than just real estate to them – it’s important that the new owners fit the bill for taking over the perfect home in which they’ve raised their family. To wit, ‘nice people’ for a nice neighbourhood with good neighbours. And in yuppie couple financier Fischer Libbet (oliver Tilney) and his lawyer wife, Lindsay (Alex Sunderhaus), they seem to have found exactly what they were looking for.
So far so plain sailing. But how we then get from cracking open the wine and whisky to celebrate the deal, to the couples berating each other in ways that make George and Martha’s domestic battlefield in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look positively tame, is a cringe-inducing joy to behold.
Parks’s writing style relies heavily on nuanced emphasis and cartoonish, quick-fire delivery, and he’s well served by an excellent cast here. As layer after layer of propriety and social grace is slowly peeled away, both couples reveal an underlying tension in their marriages, while at the same time manning the barricades of their own prejudices and value systems.
The catalyst for all the fireworks is the new owners’ determination to make some alterations to the sellers’ ‘perfect home’ (primarily expanding the kitchen into the garden). It doesn’t sound much. But the beloved family pet Murphy is buried there, and what with the new owners’ disappointment at learning they’re not moving into an exclusively white neighbourhood, and their mistaken assumption the Redmonds’ daughter has Down’s syndrome, the tension sizzles until it reaches breaking point. An acerbic, caustically witty drama whose denouement really catches fire.
Assembly George Square Gardens until Aug 27