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Relative values

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 3rd December 2008

The Family Reunion
Donmar

Chicken
Hackney Empire

August: Osage County
Lyttelton

T.S. Eliot was in his fifties when he turned to the theatre. What’s amazing about his 1939 play, The Family Reunion, is its experimental verve and nonchalant risk-loving energies. Harry, a country squire, returns from eight years abroad to take possession of his estate. His wife has died in a mysterious cruising accident and Harry astounds his family by announcing that he shoved her overboard. Did he? Or is he in the grip of morbid fantasies? Eliot wants to marry several genres here, Gothic horror, country-house whodunnit, Greek tragedy and absurdist sketch-comedy and not all the play’s combinations are successful, but Jeremy Herrin’s production is undoubtedly stylish. Sam West is shrewdly cast as the heartless, delusional Harry, and he’s well supported by Penelope Wilton as the enigmatic super-intelligent Agatha and by Una Stubbs’s enjoyable mad-granny act as Ivy. The Furies who pursue Harry appear as neatly clad schoolboys carrying butterfly nets, their angelic faces whitewashed in ashen grease paint. This is a genuinely terrifying effect which, along with several other aorta-tightening flourishes, makes this a surprisingly scary show. Entertaining if not indispensable.

Chicken is marketed as a zany New York farce. Bickering pals occupy a derelict apartment. Lina is pregnant, Floyd is homeless and Wendell is convinced he can launch their other flatmate, a rooster living in a cardboard box near the TV, on a lucrative career as the champion of New York’s illegal cock-fighting circuit. Wendell is tipped off about a secret diet that converts mild-mannered chickens into murderous feathered fiends but the recipe is in the possession of a drunken stroke-victim, who speaks at the rate of one word per week. Somehow these comic elements don’t add up to a bundle of laughs on stage and the production aims instead for gritty, hard-edged realism. This it achieves, but it’s not as much fun as the title suggests.

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