PROPERTY RAGE FROM ANOTHER AGE
Here’s a curiosity from 1972; an early , rarely-seen Caryl Churchill play revived with dashing elegance under the Jermyn’s Artistic director Stella Powell-Jones. Nicely topical, given the present disastrous capital housing market, since it is about homes and those who buy , sell and rent them. It is framed in front of a beautiful assembly of front doors of various degrees of gentrification, and the black comedy centres on a horrifyingly unsympathetic North London property developer – Marion. Who at one point says “Why shouldn’t I be Genghis Khan? Empires were made by killing”.
The E-word of course makes it a doubly fashionable choice for 2023 sensibilities (for what is the property business but colonialization of private life?). For the sake of proportion, by the way, it is useful to check up the inflation calculator: just multiply by 16 all the sums involved, like house prices and the unscrupulous developer’s bribe to get sitting-tenants out.
It’s performed with great elan, Laura Doddington as Marion splendidly flinty in pursuit of money and an ex-boyfriend tenant she is busy detaching from his home, children and wife. Her husband Clegg, a closing-down butcher whose professional ambitions she scorned, plans every day how he will eventually murder her (again, Mark Huckett brings Clegg alarmingly to life, managing to be both appalling and strangely likeable, not least in his use of sexual imagery in the craft of butchery ).
Her underling Worsely (Tom Morley, again unpleasantly funny, this time with a dash of real pathos) keeps failing to kill himself due to being “overly safety-conscious”, and by the end sports a neck brace, plaster, limp and sling to go with his bandaged wrists. His job is dislodging the sitting tenants, gloomily depressed Alec and pregnant Lisa. Between them all Churchill and the cast do create many fine laughs, as the victims circle around the hellish Marion coping with their various inadequacies and victimhoods. In one magnificent moment our antiheroine exasperatedly refuses to join their world. “I can’t be a failure ,just to help”. She knows she should be socially guilty about her business and personal behaviour but “guilt is essential to progress- that gritty lump is the pearl”. Owning things is her thing: up to and including poor Lisa’s newborn baby.
So it’s a reasonably entertaining couple of hours, with a few interesting philosophical speeches from Alec, but my mind kept swerving to the word “dated”. Not because of the 1972 setting – the mental multiplication sorted that out, and much 2023 property development still dwellson the far edges of moral decency. The problem was simply the tone. Its a black-absurdist ’70s atmosphere which owes a lot to Joe Orton, who had his heyday a few years before, and also, in its brutal relish one discerns a fair bit of debt to Harold Pinter (only without the pauses). The result places it absolutely in its period: a sort of sour, faintly sadistic feelbad comedy, palpably different from even today’s noir. It’s not so much satirical or angry as irritably nihilistic.
Interestingly, Churchill allows , in reported speech only, one piece of heroic human decency, just at the very end. As if she suddenly winced and thought better of the human race than was currently fashionable. She moved on to better work, especially Top Girls.
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