WAR’S LONG SHADOW
I have a taste for “Forgotten” plays of well-made realism, illustrating how it actually felt to live in Britain through now-distant decades. This is a very early one by Michael Hastings, one of the Royal Court’s maverick stars (later he wrote Tom and Viv). But here, young and angry, his tone is of magnificently unsentimental unease rising to rage. It is a picture of a London Jewish family and neighbours in a rooming-house in about 1960, where the only solidly reassuring figure is the landlady with her headscarf and mop (Sue Kelvin, a comedienne of great class).
Expect no reassuringly comic oy-vay Jewish-family warmth: here’s a young man’s disillusion and confusion, well before the 60s even thought of swinging. WW2 is 15 years past, but its disruptive tenatacles are still skewing relationships and emotions. As teenage Suki remarks to young Sammy : ““All children whose parents have been busted up by war never are the same. We’re a special breed.” They need to move on and away from the shadow of war; Sammy’s jazz records symbolize it to him, “like life, moving fast, faster”.
Old Leo (Paul Rider) is deep in that shadow still, drinking too much, bickering with the resentful, bored younger wife Shani he took on after his wife’s death to reconstruct a family . He has summoned his 15 year old son Sammy back from an aunt to complete it but is wholly unable to communicate with him as the father he longs to be. Eddie Boyce, on a professional debut, gives us a Sammy nicely naive and openhearted at first ,but increasingly angry in his bafflement about the family and neighbours in the rooming-house (Alex Marker’s set, with stairs and landing, is vital in expressing that world).
And who wouldn’t be baffled and angry? Shani (Nathalie Barclay). bickers with Leo and is preoccupied, against her bitter husband’s will, with getting the local Rabbi to meet Sammy ,whose aunt had kept him to shul and kosher ways. She is sleeping with George the bookie from across the landing, Timothy O’Hara playing it wonderfully loathsome and crass. Meanwhile up on the landing and rarely paying her rent to an exasperated landlady is Mrs Pond (Alix Dunmore) who is either deranged or posing as such, with a series of imaginary husbands: one of the most moving moments is when Mrs Miller the landlady berates her as a fellow-widow – “You should’ve started all over again! Start again!” Those who can defy and rebuild are OK. Mrs Pond never will. Her daughter Suki (Nell Williams) has learnt, she says, to pay no attention to her mad and maddening self-absorption: “I go inside myself, leave my body so they don’t know I’ve gone”.
As the second half begins we are suddenly in a homelier mood as Shani, Mrs Miller and Sammy get out best china, tablecloth and teapot and borrowed chairs to welcome the Rabbi: virtuoso bustling and a little burst of klezmer rarher than jazz gets its own round of applause. A simple soul might expect a bit of warmhearted Jewish gathering and blessing and there is one, very touchingly as Nicholas Day’s majestic bearded Rabbi tries to warm and draw out a suddenly rebellious Sammy: rebellious at the disappointment that is his father , and the Rabbi’s injunction to “respect his mother”, a thirty-one year old minx of a stepmother who won’t give him space. He defies God “For what he’s let happen!” . Whereon nutty Mrs Pond joins the party, turning it into a sort of Joe Orton comic nightmare of embarrassment and confusion, until at last Leo returns, drunk, and Rider deploys his not inconsiderable power of rage and boiling despair .
It is brilliantly performed by all the cast, but it’s a young man’s play and oddly shaped, too passionately overdrawn out at time. A few last scenes between Mrs pond, Sammy and Suki make it feel as if it might move to a reconciliatory, youthful hope. But Sammy’s final despairing question of the universe and its meaning is what leaves us, reeling slightly, after the boiling final act.
It is an oddity, not as accomplished as his later plays, but on a freezing night bus back along the Balls Pond Road it haunted me . The director Tricia Thorns of Two’s Company has thrilled me with discoveries before , at the Finborough with London Wall and Go Bang Your Tambourine (1930s and 60s), at the Southwark Playhouse with an astonishing trio of contemporaneous WW1 plays about women’s work and lives, and back in the late 50s Hastings’ never-performed play – subtler than this one – about his real teenage life in an East End tailors’ workshop. Her directorial eye is perfectly attuned to these contemporaneous realist plays: in an age of nostalgia , sanitized bonnet-drama and overimaginative ‘reworkings” it is good to have such productions , and to know and feel how it actually felt to be there, in 20s or 30s or 1950s.
And on that bus through East London it was easy to reflect that today’s cities are full of families with just such scars , “busted up by war”, with impatient children looking for a new life and tempo.
arcolatheatre.com. to 3 feb
Rating three
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