FOUR MORE AWFUL PEOPLE, HURRAH
Two four-handers about awful middle class behaviour in a week: just what the irritable heatwave needed. This, which I caught in a late preview, is one I always like: any responsible schoolgate meeting in a nice if rather pretentious living-room. Michael and Veronica’s 11 year old son Bruno has had his front teeth damaged in a scuffle with Alan and Annette’s son Ferdinand, armed with a bit of stick. Cue the first fault-line: perpetrator-parents object to the word “armed”, so it is grudgingly amended to “furnished”.
Mutual tension must of course be muffled by social grace, so after an initial wary agreement to make the boys reconcile (or to put it Veronica’s way, make Ferdinand apologize , for his own moral good). So there is coffee and a home made clafoutis. That is interrupted too often by Alan taking calls about the pharmaceutical company he lawyers for. And by his wife having a panic attack and vomiting on Veronica’s original Kokoschka catalogue. That’s just the start, civilization’s red tooth and claws ever nearer the surface.
It’s a wonderful set by Lily Arnold, pinpoint sharp in its elegant chic middleclass minimalism with one nicely pretentious sculpture: better still, it is on an almost unnoticeably slow revolve, as the four are trapped, Huis-Clos style, in hellish circular oneupmanship and , selfrighteousness . Cue sexual, political, economic and protectively parental hostility. Especially interesting when set aside Chichester’s childless, slightly younger foursome whose whole preoccupation is with their own identity troubles. How time moves on…
It is a favourite play , polished and mean, Yasmina Reza deploying that magnificent French brutality about bourgeois behaviour, in a sharp translation by Christopher Hampton. In 2006 it was early on the curve with a character’s constant intrusive phone calls and i wondered whether it would feel dated. But to my generation it doesnt. And
the quartet under Nicholai La Barrie get it generally right, body language and deadly-flat verbal knifings perfect, from the frigid politesses to the frankly pissed once the rum comes out. As the supposed guilty parents of Ferdinand Arion Bakare is every inch the alpha male lawyer, Dinita Gohil the vomiting shyer wife, a wifely worm who finally turns in fury. Martin Hutson as Michael casts off his good-husband, caressingly possessive carapace to rise to the other man’s machismo in fearful brotherhood; Freema Agyeman as Veronica deploys the melodramatic poses of righteous idealism . And while colourblindness in casting is a mantra of the times, and all the cast have stellar records on the British stage, I have to say that there was fabulous refreshment in remembering the play’s first outing – Fiennes, Greig , McTeer and Stott all white at the Gielgud, but now having Nigerian. Ghanaian and Asian actors gleefully demonstrating that middle class awfulness is not racially exclusive… That’s what I call progress.
lyric.co.uk to 30 September
rating four
theatreCat 