THEATRE REVIEW: Home, I'm Darling - The Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield.

Laura Wade’s 2018 play has had an extended lifespan since its 2018 premiere at Theatr Clywd - the director then, as now, was Tamara Harvey - with slots in the West End and several national tours to its name. The word-playing title and effective pre-publicity (you take in the fact that this is a play about a couple who try to re-create a 1950's lifestyle in the 2010s almost by osmosis) promise an evening of situation comedy with some thoughtful touches, and that may be what the play delivers.  

What this production delivered is something less than that, and it’s easy to say why. Every scene was played at the same unvaried pace, moments of truth were thrown away like so much sudsy dish-water and several members of the cast (the female contingent - and it’s a play where women outnumber men by four to two) didn’t enunciate clearly enough, so that much of the evening passed by in a vocal blur. This being the case, it wasn’t easy to assess the merits of the play which, on this imperfect acquaintance, came across as a slight piece which attempted to provoke thought.  

The plot is not complex: Judy and Johnny are a young couple with a blandly fulfilling life together. She keeps the house in perfect order and cooks his breakfast before sending him off to earn the daily bread. The rest of her day is devoted to keeping the housework and lunching with her female friends. Their house - extravagantly created on stage, albeit with a redundant upper level - might have been lifted wholesale from a 1958 Ideal Home exhibition. But the the trick is pulled at the end of the first scene when  Judy, with Johnny safely gone, produces an Apple Mac laptop from under the table. Gradually, we are let in on the truth: the 1950's world they inhabit is nothing more than a cosy retreat they’ve fashioned to escape the pressures of the modern world, where Johnny’s job is under threat and their future looks precarious.  

This is certainly a good premise to explore several pertinent themes: the allure of the settled pace of the past against the danger of the uncertain present, how male-female relations have progressed in the last sixty years, and was ‘then’ really all it’s sometimes cracked up to be - at one point, Judy’s mother (who remembers those days) has an interesting aria on the latter point (she comes down unequivocally on the side of ‘no’) but the speech is delivered so flatly by Diane Keen that the point is almost lost.  

Elsewhere in the cast, Neil McDermott as Johnny, and Matthew Douglas as the interloping male half of another couple, delivered their lines with conviction and fleshed out their rather thin characters as much as they were able to; but Jessica Ransom in the central role of Judy was less successful in illuminating the more complex side of her character.  

The production benefited from an appropriate soundtrack between scenes (it was hard not to heave a sigh when the music faded and the play resumed) and some great choreography from Charlotte Brown, expertly executed by the limber cast. But, on this evidence at least, 'Home I’m Darling' shouldn’t encourage anyone to cancel that urgent hair-washing appointment.

Reviewer - Paul Ashcroft
on - 18.4.23