SORROW AND SUSPICION
This one had me from the first few minutes: another Jermyn find. A new play, whose young actor- writer Abigail Hood and director Kevin Tomlinson both perform in it, might rouse suspicions of indulgence or amateurism. Not a bit of it.: it is a grownup and serious piece about sorrow and suspicion, friendship and loss and hope in a time of sexual obsession and dread. It repeatedly grabs you by the throat, pulling small significant coups to overwhelms you, as theatre can , with the “sweet sad music of humanity”.
As it opens, a rather moth-eaten middle-aged man is greeting his blonde schoolgirl daughter back from detention. In the first minute we realize she is no such thing: it is him in charge of the script. She is Leah, an escort he has hired to fulfil a needed fantasy. But not with sex: he just wants his real daughter, vanished over six months ago: needs to “be in Sophie’s world again”, pretend for a few minutes by making her talk about maths classes and telly and a boy she might innocently be dating. In eases his constant, sleepless, terrified pain.
A sad resource, edging towards sick. Or is it? Moments later Tom is with his wife Gill, who is drinking too much and heading for church, which are her two resources. The sorrow in that scene hangs thick, palpable in two remarkable performances: both Jasper Jacob and Rebecca Crankshaw are faded with grief, fragile, holding on to the girl’s stuffed toy, but the paths they struggle along are diverging. Wonderful, spare writing. Both are teachers: before long the tentacles of suspicion will curl around him for being kind to a girl pupil, and that will drive Gill to suspicions of her own. “I won’t be that woman who turned a blind eye”. It is always the father police look at first. And it will not help that the poor fool has, in his desperation, resorted to that sexless but unsettling escort incident.
In a other part of the forest we keep seeing Leah (played by Hood herself with endearing simplicity) with her boyfriend Mark. She is back from another no-contact fantasy escort gig, being grilled about how far she let the client go: a mere touch on the thigh, but Mark is angry and truly terrifying. Tomlinson unleashes something familiar and dreadful. Being angry, possessive and controlling, with a nasty kink about domination and vicarious excitement, he sends his girl out for money, and then punishes her for imagined infidelity. That is horrible, all the more for not being onstage explicit.
Leah encounters Tom again, returning a wallet he dropped in the park, and a more innocently fatherly bond begins to form. Again it is believable, understated, carefully written. Maybe he is rash and she naive, but the dialogue enables us to accept the nature of their friendship in a way that – obviously – society and social media absolutely do not.
The tale develops: not every turn in it is entirely believable, yet it takes us with it. The parallels are elegant: one young girl, vanished but cherished, is grieved for, hoped for; another is abased and abused by a thug – “You’re a nothing person, your Mum and Dad fucked off, you’re fuckable, that’s all”. And here are two men: one decent and gentle and broken by loss and terror for his child, and another a brute who owns and shames his girl for power. It raises odd truths about men, women, and young girls, and the strange beauty of the way that sometimes deep grief and misfortune create in the sufferer a passionate desire to find someone weaker to help.
Frivolous it may be to say so – but it’s a mark of how carefully this barely staged play is produced – both men’s hair is absolutely perfectly created for the part. Jasper Jacob as Tom permits his hair to suggest both teacherly respectability and months of neglectful sorrow; Tomlinson as Mark has adopted that particularly oafish side-shaved brutal crop which sends any woman scuttling to the better-lit side of the road and makes fathers dread their daughters bringing that boy home. Brilliant.
Jermynstreettheatre.co.uk To 19 aug.
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