Tale of familial angst keeps us engrossed
The Humans
Hampstead Theatre, NW3
Tomorrow, Edward Hall will join family, friends and eminent figures from across British theatre at Westminster Abbey for a service of thanksgiving in memory of his father, Sir Peter Hall, who died a year ago.
Tributes will rightly be paid to a director without whom our culture would be incontestably the poorer. But thanks should also, in passing, make their way to his youngest son – who has just announced that he’s stepping down as artistic director of Hampstead Theatre after nine years at the helm.
Making a success of running this off-west End venue in north London may not carry the same prestige as founding the RSC – or getting the National Theatre off the ground on the South Bank. Yet Hall has made it a sought-after job where, a decade ago, it looked like a poisoned chalice. In fact, at the end of 2008
The Daily Telegraph’s critic, Charles Spencer, ranked the theatre as one of the worst in London – showing “dismayingly little sense of artistic vision or ambition”.
Hall has programmed some flops in his time – most recently, a sluggish satire on the fertility industry (Genesis
Inc). But his achievement has been to foster a strong, broadly appealing sense of what the theatre is about: on the main stage, big new plays on major themes, with an eye on first-rank casting and entertainment value, and downstairs a busy incubator for new work. Although Hampstead has seldom looked modish under his aegis, it has plugged into contemporary concerns. You could say Hall’s particular engagement with the fallout from the 2007 credit crunch has – ironically – helped much-needed money flow back into the theatre’s emptied coffers.
His latest US import reaffirms the tidings of financial malaise evident in David Lindsay-abaire’s Good People – staged in 2014 – and Branden Jacobs-jenkins’s Gloria, seen last summer. Stephen Karam’s The Humans – which won four Tony Awards in 2016 and now materialises with its utterly superb New York cast and creative team, led by director Joe Mantello, intact – serves up a family drama that might be subtitled “Nightmare on Main Street”.
Set in a dreary New York Chinatown basement flat (“duplex” but not deluxe) newly occupied by twentysomething musician Brigid Blake and her decade-older partner Richard, the play follows a handful of people clustered in fragile familial amity.
Everyone we see is conversant with the struggle to keep going until the next pay cheque. There’s 79-year-old Momo, the Irish immigrant who toiled her way out of the New York slums, now in a wheelchair and afflicted by dementia. Her son Erik has kept his head above water as the guy in charge of maintenance at a high school in Scranton, Pennsylvania (incidentally, the setting for the US version of The
Office), but he’s sitting on some bad news. Erik’s weary wife Deirdre does high-minded volunteering, but is mainly the stooped attendant for Momo, unable as they are to afford a home-help. The quintet is completed by Aimee, dumped by her girlfriend and junked by her law firm because she has ulcerative colitis.
They’ve gathered for Thanksgiving, but what is there to be grateful for? “Don’t you think it should cost less to be alive?” Reed Birney’s Erik bleakly joshes as he swigs a beer and stares into the future. It’s a throwaway remark in a play that relishes casual (often comically so) conversation, but it’s telling, with a hint of Willy Loman’s gloomy surmise in Death of a Salesman
(“You end up worth more dead than alive”). Just as Miller’s masterpiece played with form, so Karam’s potent – and finally searing – portrait of what we would call over here the Jams (“just about managings”) is tricksier than it at first appears.
Crashes and thuds from the floor above initially combine with other spooking environmental factors to open a window on the stresses and strangeness of the neighbourhood. Yet as the piece moves on, and winter darkness – assisted by blown bulbs and fuses – takes hold, it’s as if everything we’re looking at acquires the malevolence that Erik, too close for comfort to the 9/11 attacks, says he experiences in his dreams. Are we watching a naturalistic play about an ordinary family or an eerie summation of humanity akin to Munch’s The
Scream? Ingeniously, both.