An exploration of grief that doesn’t go deep enough
There are few more instantly poignant sights than a makeshift roadside memorial – the weatherbeaten bouquet tributes, the forlorn mementos – to a child who has been run over. A fleeting moment of inexperience and inattention – a lifetime of pain for those who knew the child, and perhaps the driver involved too.
This devastating nightmare of loss forms the basis for American playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s
Rabbit Hole, which won a Pulitzer Prize after its 2006 New York premiere was made into a film starring Nicole Kidman, and now gets its first UK showing at Hampstead.
In Edward Hall’s stylish production, Claire Skinner, almost a national treasure after playing the harassed but kindly mum in Outnumbered, takes the Kidman role of New Yorker Becca, whose four-year-old son Danny dashed outside after the family dog and was mowed down by a teenage driver.
Eight months on and despite a semblance of restored normality, a spirit of estrangement has settled between her and her husband Howie. Differences of opinion glide beneath the surface as they pad round their once-perfect house – whether they should move, what things of the boy’s to keep, and when to resume love-making.
There are various more crudely “exciting” things that Lindsay-Abaire could have done with the raw material of grief: wars of words, madness, even revenge. But the watchword here is restraint. Considerate Howie (a grizzled Tom Goodman-Hill) nurses a beer for comfort, consoles himself with home movies.
Becca tries to rise above ugly emotions when her feckless younger sister Izzy (an entertainingly garrulous Georgina Rich) reveals she’s pregnant, or her mother Nat (a cautiously vivacious Penny Downie) casually compares this grieving process with the one she went through when Becca’s drug-addict brother killed himself. There’s a reported meltdown at a supermarket when Becca snaps at another mother.
But even when the driver, a politely apprehensive youth called Jason, writes a letter and then shows up to make amends, this is the catalyst – after a flare-up of ire from Howie – for something reflective, tender, almost inconclusive and anti-climactic.
The piece feels sincere – the playing absolutely so. What has happened is beyond easy words, but at times we’re made too aware of that difficulty, the delicate understatement. The most affecting moment comes when Skinner’s pale, frail, tensely self-composed mother releases a torrent of sobs that have been held in check by tight lips and eyelids that linger shut. It’s the sweetnatured, nervous laughter of the contrite young man (Sean Delaney), his whole life ahead of him, that sets her off.
It’s the closest we come to unbridled feeling, yet even here there’s a neat dramatic symmetry at play, as much art as heart.
I admired this play a lot – but admiration is an arm’s length response. Pardon the punning allusion to the title (which draws on a story Jason has penned about a warren leading to parallel universes), but for me Rabbit Hole bravely peers into a subject most of us would rather not face – yet doesn’t quite burrow deep enough.
What has happened is beyond easy words, but at times we’re made too aware of that difficulty