Bourgeois frippery

Regime change at Hampstead Theatre. The era of special measures is over and Ed Hall, son of Sir Peter, has taken charge. Hall’s debut show is daring in its complete lack of audacity.

Regime change at Hampstead Theatre. The era of special measures is over and Ed Hall, son of Sir Peter, has taken charge. Hall’s debut show is daring in its complete lack of audacity. Shelagh Stephenson’s new play Enlightenment is the sort of bourgeois frippery we were used to yawning through under the previous administration. We’re in a posh house in Angstead Garden Suburb where two yuppie liberals are struggling to cope with the disappearance of their gap-year son in south-east Asia. Mum consults a psychic. Dad invites a TV producer to make a shock-doc highlighting their plight. When a confused drifter turns up claiming to be the lost Odysseus, Mum lets him stay in the spare room as an ersatz offspring.

This is a rather contrived way to explore the issues of bereavement and identity, and the play takes some decidedly nasty detours towards the end. Sliced flesh, bashed-out brains and multiple ketchup spillages are involved. And yet this undemanding show kept me engaged throughout. The theatre was full. The audience was attentive. Many of them were young but they didn’t cough, fidget, gossip or text. And the script got plenty of big laughs. These may sound like negligible achievements but they’re fundamental, and if you don’t secure your foundations you fall through a hole and never reappear. Ed Hall elicits a great performance from Daisy Beaumont as a manipulative TV executive, and Richard Clothier is sublimely funny as the agitated Dad who calls Mum’s hired psychic ‘that twat in a cardigan sniffing my son’s socks’.