Hard to like, impossible to discount. Neil LaBute delivers another of his exquisitely sordid insights into the damaged terrain of the privileged bourgeoisie with his new melodrama, In a Forest Dark and Deep. The setting is a small house near an American university. College lecturer Betty is being helped by her trailer-trash brother Bobby to clear out the detritus left by a departing tenant. LaBute’s storyline adheres very strictly to the timetable laid down by screenplay seminars: every 20 minutes a new revelation flips the plot entirely on its head. This tick-tock regularity gives the play an unwelcome air of artifice.
First we learn that Betty is more a sugar mummy than a landlady to her absent tenant. Then we discover that her marriage is in ruins and her cheating husband has no idea about her love cranny in the woods. The remaining revelations concern her departed lover, and the final twist is entirely predictable because by that stage the play has touched the bottom rung of depravity and has nowhere else to go.
As always, LaBute’s characters fall into two classes of creative accomplishment. His men are effortless, his women look like an acquired skill. Bobby is a straight-A dropout, all clenched athleticism and embittered eloquence, who prowls the stage delivering savage homilies on the woes of Africa, the messianic delusions of Bono and the prissy affectations of academics. Betty is a more monochrome figure, a beautiful well-read prig whose campus refinement conceals a dark hinterland of lust, jealousy and worse. Her serial lying and her nymphomania feel a tad fortuitous, not so much a function of her personality as a pretext for the author to fashion a first-rate thriller from modest materials.
Olivia Williams makes a stylishly sexy Betty while Matthew Fox brings a sense of death-row menace and candour to Bobby. The opposition of these two siblings — puritanical odd-jobman and promiscuous blue-stocking — has more than a hint of bad porn about it, and LaBute’s intention may well be that simple. To shock, to provoke and to entertain. Highly enjoyable as a thriller, faintly questionable as an artistic achievement, this is ultimately a shaggy-dog story, or, in obeisance to gender equality, a shaggy-bitch story.
It’s an ideal play for a first date. There are no icky romantic corners. The script is gripping, the rhetoric is persistently witty and the characters have a sophisticated and eccentric attitude to Big Topics like racism, homophobia, incest and wife-beating. The running time of 95 minutes means you can be in Pizza Express by 9.20 discussing misogyny over a Fiorentina.
The Holy Rosenbergs by Ryan Craig introduces us to a Jewish family in Edgware struggling to overcome two oddly asymmetrical calamities. Dad’s catering business has taken a knock after a diner expired from a tainted salmon mousse. And the family’s eldest son has been shot down while serving in the Israeli Defence Force.
Craig commits a beginner’s blunder here by lifting a classic plot (from Miller’s All My Sons) without asking himself whether the booty will work as well for him as it did for its original owner. The stolen goods unnerve and muddle him. The young airman’s death has become the subject of an inquiry which his sister Ruth, a human-rights lawyer, is also associated with, and her involvement has exposed the family to anonymous intimidation from within the Jewish community. A protest at the funeral threatens to harm Dad’s attempt to re-establish his business. These flapping, flailing threads tangle the storyline in knots.
Craig is far happier as a social comedian serving up lightweight observational comments. The Rosenbergs are addicted to baking and they force home-made macaroons on everyone who crosses their threshold. ‘He’s a rabbi, not a spaniel,’ says Ruth, as her mother plies a visiting cleric with pastries. Later, she explains that her father has mastered the art of simulating interest in football ‘by faking outrage and resignation in equal measure’.
The script is marred throughout by its wonky architecture. A potential suitor arrives for Ruth in the first scene and their unexplained romance vanishes without trace. Towards the end we get a ten-minute debate about ethical standards in wartime which has scant impact on the characters and, consequently, on us. Susannah Wise is highly watchable as the cool and slinky Ruth. Henry Goodman, ever a pleasure, is slightly miscast as the soppy, angry Dad. Goodman’s favourite key, a sort of unhinged merriment, is heard only in the faintest echo here.
Neutrals like me are bound to find the play only fitfully diverting but those who want to make sense of what Jonathan Freedland, in the programme note, calls ‘the burning, aching attachment most British Jews feel for Israel’ will find it not just absorbing but also unmissable. At the end many were on their feet.
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