This dark comedy is a re-working of award winning playwright Torben Betts’ earlier work, Monogamy, by The Original Theatre Company. It is something of a homecoming for Betts, an ex-Liverpool University alumnus who has been described as Alan Ayckbourn’s love child - preoccupied as he is by the stress and anxiety beneath the surface of apparently calm and privileged lives.
One hot midsummer’s day, Caroline Mortimer (Caroline Langrishe), the nation’s second favourite (ahem) TV chef seems to be living the dream, with a successful career, a trendy North London home (although we ever only see the kitchen), a wealthy ex-banker husband and a son who has triumphed academically. Very soon though, an apparently glittering life hits the skids as revelations about drunkenness and infidelity become the starting point for the exposure and unravelling of every character that enters Caroline’s overheated kitchen.
Betts’ domestic tragi-comedy explores the themes of (get ready) politics, class, the decline of marriage and the nuclear family, the sins of the fathers (and mothers), the hypocrisy of married life, the gulf between public faces and private lives, ageing, mental illness, homophobia, the impossibility of the romantic ideal, religion – oh, and erm, a potentially impending apocalypse or possibly Gaia’s revenge on humanity. Everything except the SMEG fridge is thrown into the mix, to the point of overburdening the script and, in the final act, the golden rule of ‘show not tell’ is broken again and again as backstories come tumbling out in a bewildering torrent.
The packed house may have been largely due to the pulling power of Langrishe, a familiar face from TV drama, but the figure of Aden Gillett dominated the stage whenever he appeared as Caroline’s unreconstructed, casually racist, lascivious thanatophobic husband Mike - raging against the dying of the light with guilt, self-recrimination and blind panic.
Alastair Whatley’s direction is snappy and the ensemble cast wholeheartedly and energetically pull off the increasingly physical demands of the script, however the frantic, almost violently Jacobean climax sits uneasily alongside the more sit-com-flavoured first act. Ironically, my whinge is that the play doesn’t go far enough – restoring a neat if not exactly happy but dramatically unsatisfying ending.
The programme states that the play, ‘speaks to all of us trying to juggle the demands and pressures of twentieth century life’ but unfortunately the characters are hardly relatable and border on stereotypes – with the emphasis on the Daily Mail reading upper-middle classes. Very little sympathy can therefore be found for the characters in general, although Caroline’s impassioned cry of “It’s not meant to be like this!” as her world collapses around her is plaintively affecting.
What is done extremely deftly - and heartbreakingly so – is the rendering of the inability of characters to listen to each other; heartfelt revelations and earnest confidences are tossed across the stage, but these become conversations at odds and cross purposes, with characters talking across each other, ignoring the desperation of their loved ones and pursuing their own obsessive needs. Characters are so enveloped in their own distress and fear that they fail to even register the pain of those closest to them. It is this which quietly lingers, long after the spectacle and the bombast of this thematically-packed and deliberately overwrought play is over.
Reviewer - Tracy Ryan
on - 19/3/19
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