THEATRE REVIEW: Leaves Of Glass - Park Theatre, London.

'The first unhappy love affair we have, is with our parents’, wrote Sigmund Freud. Philip Ridley’s 2005 play, revived by Max Harrison for the Park Theatre, takes this epigram as its premise and constructs from it a vivid picture of the family as a grotesque charnel house, where the living live cheek by jowl with the dead, the spirits of the deceased continuing to wield a baleful influence over the lives of the quick. 

Steven and Barry are brothers, but superficially have little in common: Steven is a successful entrepreneur and owner of a graffiti removal company; he is about to start a family with his (slightly older) wife Debbie, formerly his secretary. Barry, by contrast, a talented artist and occasional employee of Steve’s, seems blighted by a lack of focus and an inability to put the traumatic events of their childhood behind him. That childhood, framed by the suicide of their father when they were too young to understand such things,  was dominated by their mother, LIz,. Liz, who wears her martyrdom as to the manner born, knows all, sees all, and suspects all: while she remains a part of their lives (and being only in her fifties, she’ll be around for quite some time yet), her boys will never escape from their pasts.  

Given the author, this could never be a straightforward family drama and Ridley has woven into this claustrophobic story a number of allusions and metaphors that may distract as much as they inform: the titular leaves of glass may reference a glass tree Steven bought his mother after she was widowed, for which he supplied a ‘single glass’ leaf each week for decoration; but it also alludes to Barry’s painting, Love Song For The Offspring Of Enola Gay, a representation of Hiroshima’s landscape after the bomb (‘Little Boy’) had been dropped; its pilot, of course, had named the plane that dropped the bomb after his mother. Even the final confrontation between the brothers, played in the minimal light from a candelabrum, appears loaded with ambiguity until we learn the horrifying truth that underpins their relationship, and which has warped them into adulthood.  

This was a well-nigh faultless production, played in the round in the Park’s ideally intimate auditorium. Ned Costello’s Steven was tight-lipped slow to smile and carried a discernible undercurrent of unease: he delivered the retrospective monologues that punctuate the action with a consummate sensitivity; as his brother Barry, Joseph Potter had a quickfire physicality and sense of danger that kept you guessing as to what he might do next (the brothers’ beautifully choreographed ‘quiet fight’ while their mum is in the kitchen making tea was a highlight of the evening). In Katie Bucholz’s Debbie, we saw the future matriarch emerging from the aspirational wife; and Kacie Ainsworth’s Liz was a truly terrifying figure of castrating compassion, relatable but monstrous.  

Played without an interval (1 hour, 45 minutes) 'Leaves Of Glass' is a rich, potent brew of a play, containing far more than can be unpacked in the space of a single review or an overnight mulling of its themes: it should be seen, then seen again.  

Reviewer - Paul Ashcroft
on - 15.5.23