Parlour Song
Almeida
Tusk Tusk
Royal Court
Back in 1995 Jez Butterworth got tagged with the ‘Most Promising Playwright’ beeper and he still hasn’t shaken it off. Butterworth is an excellent second-rate writer, he has a wonderful knack for quirky comic dialogue but he wants to be a Great Artist too. A pity. All a playwright should aim to be is an entertainer. Butterworth’s new play, Parlour Song, is set in an estate full of suburban semis and it opens with two male pals joshing aggressively in a sitting-room. Andrew Lincoln’s sleek young Dale runs a car-wash business and complains of ‘pruney fingers’. Toby Jones’s squat, balding Ned works in demolition and wields Zeus-like powers of life and death over huge industrial buildings. Gorgeous-but-weedy guy meets ugly-but-tough guy. The interlocking symmetries in this friendship, the dovetailings of loyalty and rivalry, are beautifully laid out. Add Ned’s frustrated wife and you have scope for a cracking suburban love-triangle. But the script isn’t up to it and director Ian Rickson, evidently convinced he’s working with a genius, lays on the full Theatre of Significance treatment. To put a suburban lounge on stage would be too obvious and prosaic (and too likely to invite comparison with Mike Leigh, which Butterworth may want to avoid because he’s nearly as good as Leigh, but not quite). So instead the sitcom is presented against a series of revolving black flats, with video projections, pert overhead quotations, prize-winning lighting arrangements and bits of mimed action glimpsed through diaphanous screens. After an amusing first half the play drifts into artful, poetic whimsy. The promised conflicts never materialise and the plot turns into illogical mush. Late on, one of the characters suddenly remembers he has two small children. ‘I’d do anything for them,’ he comments with a frown. The performers are terrific, especially Amanda Drew as Ned’s silky sex-pot wife, and it’s a shame Butterworth and Rickson have under-estimated their genre. Sitcom is a canvas which can encompass greatness. So come on, chaps, calm down a bit. Give us a nice comedy and we’ll go home happy.
Last year’s ‘Most Promising’ tracker-device was locked round the ankle of Polly Stenham. Her first play got a West End run and opened up some novel terrain: posh kids in peril from their feckless, drunken parents. Her new play revisits the same territory but this time the pill-popping, nympho mum has been omitted from the action altogether, which makes for a cleaner, more unified set-up. Dumped in a new flat and left to fend for themselves, the shouty, needy, troubled spratlings try to recreate the lost certainties of childhood by taking turns to play-act the authority figure. It’s Lord of the Flies in Richmond. There’s plenty of drinking, smoking and slapping in this trustafarian Wendy House but Stenham never tries to vary the volume or the texture. Only in the final moments, when some adults show up and we discover mum’s fate, does the play acquire real dramatic fibre.
Though Stenham has a facility for comedy she evidently feels the gold-seam lies elsewhere in her peculiar strain of sentimental aphorism. ‘Families,’ declares 14-year-old Maggie, ‘are people who suffer for each other. Who suffer each other.’ Nice one. An exquisitely worked quibble. But the line should have been cut. Writers say things like that. Little girls don’t. The same character blurts out, ‘I feel like I’m in a bad Enid Blyton novel.’ Another fine line but one with perils of its own. Malign reviewers might use it as a verdict on the play. I’m only half-smitten by Stenham’s variety of Range Rover angst. It’s extremely well observed and extremely limited. Can she do anything else? I doubt we’ll ever find out.
Comments