Trouble at home

The Almeida relishes its specialist status. The boss, Michael Attenborough, isn’t keen on celebrity casting because he wants ‘the theatre to be the star’. It’s a niche operation for purists and connoisseurs, for seekers and searchers, and for those who can spell Verfremdungseffekt without having to check (as I just had to) what the penultimate letter is. We’re privileged to have a theatre in London that wants to raise the bar rather than the bar prices.

The Almeida relishes its specialist status. The boss, Michael Attenborough, isn’t keen on celebrity casting because he wants ‘the theatre to be the star’. It’s a niche operation for purists and connoisseurs, for seekers and searchers, and for those who can spell Verfremdungseffekt without having to check (as I just had to) what the penultimate letter is. We’re privileged to have a theatre in London that wants to raise the bar rather than the bar prices. Just occasionally the Almeida startles us all by flouting its self-imposed asceticism and laying on a straight-up-and-down smash-hit comedy, as if to remind us that it could deliver smart, funny populist shows every night of the week if it wanted to, but it knows we’re better than that.

Becky Shaw, by Gina Gionfriddo, takes a peek into the troubled heart of middle-class America. The play is messy throughout, deliberately and artfully messy, and it opens with a family coming together to dispose of the deceased father’s assets. There are rumours that the old man was gay. A close Japanese pal is said to be in floods of tears. The widow Susan, struggling with MS, is conducting a desperate last-fling affair with a mail fraudster ten years her junior.

Her daughter Suzanna — and the mother and daughter’s names are messily close to each other but not quite exact copies — is emotionally involved with her adoptive brother, Max.