Diffident misfits

In a Dark Dark House
Almeida

I Found My Horn
Tristan Bates

Maria Friedman: Re-Arranged
Trafalgar Studios

What, already? Another Neil LaBute play? Here we go again then. This time his close-knit group of eloquent and stylishly tormented yuppies (he doesn’t do other types) are haunted by the aftermath of a child abuse episode. As kid brothers, Terry and Drew were interfered with by a friend of the family and now, years later, Drew has been charged with drunkenly crashing his car. He persuades Terry to appear in court as a character witness and to mention the abuse in order to soften up the judges before sentencing. The ruse works, Terry testifies, Drew gets off.

This is a bizarre idea. Victims of child rape are partially exempt from the drink-drive laws? But LaBute isn’t interested in jurisprudential oddities and concentrates instead on the men’s attitude to their abuser. As always in dramas like this (and I see a version of this play at least once a year) the abusee always harbours gnarled longings for the abuser. I’ve never really bought that idea, and I didn’t here, but dramatists are drawn to it for pragmatic reasons. In this tangled context, love is a more pleasingly warped emotion than hate.

Terry is traumatised afresh by the court case and decides to track down his abuser once and for all. Somewhat fortuitously, he bumps into the man’s flirtatious 15-year-old daughter, Jennifer, in the middle of a lonely golf course. An absorbing Lolita-esque mating dance begins between this pair of diffident misfits. David Morrissey is both creepy and charming as the predatory Terry and Kira Sternbach’s Jennifer is brilliantly done, a nervy basketful of buxom young lust. Their weird, kinky confrontation — illuminated by Sternbach’s mesmerising performance — is the highlight of the show but in the closing scenes the script lapses into more prosaic territory. Terry and Drew meet up and several shocking truths about their childhoods are dislodged and exposed.

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