A painfully honest portrait of an everyday, middle-aged marriage
Middle
National’s Dorfman Theatre London SE1 ★★★★★
‘I’ve wanted us to talk for weeks and weeks and weeks,” says Maggie, nursing a mug of warm milk and a heap of pent-up emotion at the start of Middle, the central component of a planned triptych of plays by David Eldridge about relationships that began with Beginning in 2017 and will conclude with End.
It’s about 4am and the habitually safe space of a stylish kitchen-cum-living room, in a large family home in the commuter suburb of Shenfield, Essex, has become a chasm into which a marriage is falling. Maggie’s husband Gary only got out of bed to relieve his bladder and now his world is imploding. “I’m all ears,” he says, but he’s blocking out the incoming bad news, hopping about conversationally, blathering on about his dreams
“I don’t love you any more,” his insomniac spouse informs him. “Stop it,” he replies. It’s as if a death is being announced and Gary, at 49 just a year older than the author, is entering the first stage of grief – denial, trying, with blokey bluntness, to rationalise Maggie’s upset. Before the end of the night, 100 minutes of circling conversation taking us to sunrise, he experiences anger, depression and acceptance too.
I adored Beginning – as did many others – and yet while Middle, set in 2016 and about a different couple, has the same interest in concentrated emotional interaction, it didn’t resonate quite as deeply. This is odd because it’s closer to my own past experience of marital collapse, with young offspring implicated too (here an unseen eight-year-old, Annabelle). Is this because it is too close for comfort? No, painful at times though it is to watch, as it will be for anyone who has gone through something like this, I found it rewarding and insightful, steeped in raw honesty. Still, at points it feels a bit artlessly heart on sleeve.
Maggie’s revelations about a blossoming romance elsewhere, with a policeman whose own marriage is on the rocks, inevitably recalls Brief Encounter. But where Noël Coward found searing understatement in British reticence, the couple here, though restrained by modern standards (there’s no effing and blinding, albeit there’s some crockery smashing), fall prey to oversharing.
Did I believe that Claire Rushbrook’s Maggie would start recapping her time at university and expounding on her career frustrations? Not at such length. That said, there’s some neat incidental wit here –“I don’t think they do conscious uncoupling in Essex. Unconscious coupling, yep,” jibes Daniel Ryan’s Gary. And Eldridge is good at conveying the comic tactlessness of those so bound up in their own feelings they’ve forgotten that others have them too.
Director Polly Findlay elicits finely calibrated performances. Padding about in West Ham jim-jams, Ryan convinces as an archetypal breadwinner who’s not thick but can’t get his head round rejection, and all its implications. Rushbrook is quietly impressive, suggesting a reservoir of loneliness and longing that has reached overflow.
I applaud them both, and Eldridge, for shining a light on an unfashionable demographic – affluent southern working-class, Generation X-ers. It’s not the most explosive evening but arguably it’s new writing at its most essential, doggedly unpicking the minutiae of daily life, asking “where next?” when we’ve run out of road.
Until June 18. Tickets: 020 3989 5455; nationaltheatre.org.uk