Hard to believe this rambling apprentice-piece ever made it to the stage: Almeida’s The House of Shades reviewed

The House of Shades is a state-of-the nation play that covers the past six decades of grinding poverty in Nottingham. The action opens in 1965 with a corpse being sponged down by an amusingly saucy mortician. The dead man, Alistair, sits up and walks into the kitchen where he natters with his prickly, loud-mouthed wife, Constance (Anne-Marie Duff). They seem to live in the city’s most dangerous dwelling. People keep dying. Then they come back to life to make a speech or two. Constance’s pregnant daughter doesn’t survive a back-room abortion and she shows up half a dozen times in a skirt dripping with blood. Alistair expires again and returns to life to tell us what it’s like to die. How the writer, Beth Steel, researched this experience isn’t clear. We have to take her word for it. Nye Bevan’s ghost shows up on a turnip patch and he explains that democracy can alleviate poverty by attacking property. Thanks, Nye. Very interesting. Granny collapses of something or other and returns from the dead to reveal that her career as an ill-paid skivvy was no better than being a ghost. Cheers, Gran. Sorry to hear that.

On and on this shapeless muddle grinds. Every half-hour or so the action leaps forward to a new decade. The chippy, witless dialogue seems to have been lifted from old Coronation Street episodes: ‘I’m the man in this house… you should be ashamed of yourself… marrying you was the worst mistake I ever made.’ The aggressive banalities are interspersed with heavy-handed references to political issues. Inflation, unemployment, privatisation and mine closures are mentioned but never properly examined. The level of analysis would bore a 12-year-old. A character in 1996 tells us that Tony Blair stands a good chance of becoming prime minister. Really? Who knew that? Each political controversy seems to anger every member of the household and they descend into foul-mouthed ranting and violence.