Family at war

I couldn’t wait for this one. Nina Raine’s debut play Rabbit was a blast. With exquisite scalpel-work she dissected the romantic entanglements of a quartet of posh young professionals. Her new effort, Tribes, opens on similar terrain. A family of bourgeois Londoners are seated around the dinner table punishing each other with rhetorical flick-knives. Dad and Mum are writers. Ruth is a jobless soprano. Dan is wasting his youth smoking skunk and writing an impenetrable thesis on linguistics.

I couldn’t wait for this one. Nina Raine’s debut play Rabbit was a blast. With exquisite scalpel-work she dissected the romantic entanglements of a quartet of posh young professionals. Her new effort, Tribes, opens on similar terrain. A family of bourgeois Londoners are seated around the dinner table punishing each other with rhetorical flick-knives. Dad and Mum are writers. Ruth is a jobless soprano. Dan is wasting his youth smoking skunk and writing an impenetrable thesis on linguistics.

A third child, Billy, is profoundly deaf and is continually patronised by his family. Raine’s dialogue glitters with self-delighting cruelty. Dad (played with malignant precision by Stanley Townsend) prowls the room unleashing weapons-grade invective at his absent enemies. ‘Why would you want to stick your cock in that cement-mixer?’ he says of his sister-in-law. ‘She was a northern twat,’ he tells Dan, of an ex-girlfriend. ‘She had all the charisma of a bus shelter. After spending time with her your IQ visibly halved.’ The London audience guffawed merrily at these near-forbidden slurs and I joined in, my pleasure heightened by my adjacency to Paul Morley, a fundamentalist northerner, whose ashen face was Botoxed into a look of insatiable hostility throughout the play.

But then the focus shifted. The razor-sharp dialogue softened and gave way to earnest soul-searching.