Is three hours of misery what an audience craves?
ONE character in The House Of Shades, starring Anne-Marie Duff at Islington’s Almeida theatre, has an interesting question. Given that we’re all stuck on a rock, hurtling towards extinction, how come we’re not all clinging on, screaming?
I’d have thought that would be a good question for playwright Beth Steel to have a go at answering. No such luck, alas. She prefers to turn in a misery-marathon which itself clings to the stage, screaming, for nigh on three hours.
Spanning five decades in a Nottingham tenement, her heroine Constance (Duff) is a potty-mouthed Mam who cusses her way through her seven ages, even unto the finishing line in hospital.
Starting in 1965, she rejoices at her violent father’s death; and later blames her failures in life on her perfectly inoffensive husband Alistair (Stuart McQuarrie).
But her most distressing action is killing one of her teenage daughters and her baby while performing an on-stage abortion with a coat hanger. Astonishingly, we are apparently meant to sympathise with Constance because she’s a frustrated crooner who was once abandoned by a creepy variety MC who sported a dodgy wig.
Although we’re advised in great depth — and at great length — just how miserable life is for everyone in this family, there is no sense of anything that makes life worth living ... beyond potted meat and a cuppa.
McQuarrie’s poor old dad is written as a colourless sap, who curiously enjoys the two best scenes: meeting the ghost of his hero Nye Bevan on his allotment; and, after shuffling off this mortal coil, being visited by his son Jack in the morgue.
As Jack, who turns Tory just to spite his shop steward father, Michael Grady-Hall is a hatchetfaced loner. Kelly Gough, as his twin sister Agnes, at least gets to scream with rage, in line with the author’s existential terror. So that leaves Beatie Edney with the best part: a sourpuss curtain twitcher tut-tutting, between scenes, down the years. Blanche McIntyre’s production is otherwise a humdrum dirge — bar a horrific Grand Guignol of gynaecological gore after the interval. Consider yourself lucky to get out alive. n THE misery continues over in Hampstead, with Naomi Wallace’s play The Breach. This one is about a 12-year-old in 70s Kentucky who arranges with his sexually precocious big sister for her to be drugged and molested, as a show of loyalty to a group of friends.
Were we able to sympathise with the characters, it might have helped us get involved with this horrible idea. But instead, the play feels like a live action episode of the TV cartoon show South Park — with all the fun taken out.
Little brother Acton (Stanley
Morgan) is not much more than a psychologically vulnerable asthmatic; and his friends Hoke and Frayne (Alfie Jones and Charlie Beck) are a pair of deluded sexual obsessives way out of their depth.
Most striking is Shannon Tarbet as big sister Jude, who terrifies her brother’s friends with her sexual candour.
But Sarah Frankcom’s production is as emotionally inert as the basement set is lifeless.
Ominously, the play has been conceived as the first of a trilogy. Too many subsidised theatres look seriously out of touch with audiences. They might all benefit from a cold blast of commercial reality.