The House of Shades review — Anne-Marie Duff is magnificent

The House of Shades

Almeida Theatre, London

A tight-knit group of people caught up in vast socio-economic changes — it’s a scenario that has given us some of the greatest plays ever written: Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat . . . That same approach drives two new plays just opened in London, one set in the UK, the other in the US. Both focus in hard on a small group of people — family or adopted family — and both examine how their experience reflects and refracts the wider changes in society.

In Beth Steel’s The House of Shades, set in a working-class Nottinghamshire household, a family trauma, inspired by Greek tragedy, ripples down the generations. What emerges is an epic, bold, compassionate state-of-the-nation piece that rolls from 1965 to 2019, tracing the shift in voting patterns and priorities. Each act calls in at a key moment in UK politics: the early Wilson government, the winter of discontent and rise of Thatcher (1979), the miners’ strike (1985), the emergence of New Labour (1996) and the run-up to the 2019 election and the collapse of the “red wall”.

The fractures in the country run through the family. Son Jack (Michael Grady-Hall) grows up to be an avid Thatcherite at daggers drawn with his trade union shop steward father (an excellent Stuart McQuarrie). Daughter Agnes, brimming with hope for independence and equality in 1965 (Issie Riley), becomes a careworn, embittered spectre by 2019 (Kelly Gough), working two jobs to make ends meet. The fight between Jack and Agnes, tearing into each other over the destruction of their community, is blistering.

Steel’s play pulses with care and fury for the people left behind by global economic shifts and national politics. In that sense, it’s a Brexit play. It’s not sentimental, and its scope and depth are admirable, seeking to catch a hold of what has happened to the UK over the past 50 years. It is suffused in lost hope and haunted by ghosts — both literal and political — and it’s in the female characters that we see most potently the corrosive effect of disillusionment and the tough realities of poverty. The overlaps between a grim birth story in 1965 and another in 2019 tell their own story.

But the play’s ambition comes at a cost. We effectively get 30 minutes per episode, meaning that there is little time to work the issues into the texture of the drama and so huge questions tend to get rammed into stilted debates, which even for a politically engaged family too often feel engineered. And while there are some great, funny lines, there is also a good deal of clunky dialectic and exposition. It’s a difficult problem: the play’s scope is important, but it also undermines the dramatic quality of individual scenes and clips significant emotional moments.

Blanche McIntyre’s staging embraces the rolling, switching drive of the play, however, while her first-rate ensemble often double up, quietly reinforcing the patterns within the drama. At the centre is Anne-Marie Duff’s passionate, angry, desolate matriarch Constance, a thwarted singer, who blazes with indignation at the shabby hand life has dealt her and retreats into fantasies of a glamorous life elsewhere.

Duff is the soul of the play: tart, cruel, funny, desperate — a woman who yearns for something else, something better, and who is curdled by disappointment and haunted by guilt. She is magnificent; the play itself is bold, uneven, hugely welcome in its ambition, but struggles to pull it all off.

★★★☆☆

To June 18, almeida.co.uk

The Breach

Hampstead Theatre, London

Naomi Wallace’s new play, The Breach, likewise sets close family relationships against a changing political and industrial backdrop. Again a critical period of 20th-century history is under review, but here we are in Kentucky, and the time span is 1977 to 1991.

Central to the action is Jude. In 1977, she is a fierce and fiercely independent 17-year-old (Shannon Tarbet), fizzing with life, rage, energy and hope. By 1991, she has become a wan, guarded 31-year-old (Jasmine Blackborow), still with that tough exterior but with a brittle, damaged air.

What’s happened in between? Well, the 1980s and Reaganomics, for a start, which clearly haven’t served Jude well: by 1991 she is poor and living apart from her six-year-old daughter. But also the far-reaching consequences of a drunken birthday party in 1977 and a disastrous pact between her younger brother, Acton (Stanley Morgan), and two of his friends, Hoke (Alfie Jones) and Frayne (Charlie Beck).

It’s this personal terrain that is the main focus of Wallace’s play, as it shifts back and forth between the two time periods, all the while circling what happened that night. Questions of loyalty, love and betrayal thread through action. Teenage Jude, ferociously protective of Acton, drives a hard bargain with the young Hoke and Frayne when they want to use the siblings’ basement as a lair. But there’s a tension between the brother-sister bond and the male friends’ bond that intensifies, culminating a terrible sexual assault.

Rumbling away in the background are the global events that define and circumscribe the teenagers’ lives: the death in an industrial accident of Jude and Acton’s father; the presence of Frayne’s damaged Vietnam vet brother; the contrasting wealth and ease of Hoke. In adulthood, those socio-economic differences have deepened. Wallace splices the personal and political, raising issues of exploitation, of consent, of power and entitlement.

All this is resonant, and both Wallace and the young cast — particularly Tarbet’s spiky, volatile Jude — catch well the brooding intensity of adolescence. Sarah Frankcom’s production plays out in a grey, featureless space, designed by Naomi Dawson, that represents both the basement and the arena of memory.

But there’s something oddly hollow about it. Crucially, the central event doesn’t ring true. It certainly could happen — sexual assault is a shockingly common crime — but here it’s hard to believe it and the way it is handled feels much more glib than it is surely intended to. We never get close enough to the characters to understand fully their emotional response, which just doesn’t feel right for something so catastrophic. 

Meanwhile the style of performance, specified by Wallace in the text — “the wilder the moment the more still the body” — has a logic, given how deeply these characters bury their feelings, but it produces a very static experience on stage. Wallace has written some great, tough, bruising plays, but this isn’t one of her best.

★★☆☆☆

To June 4, hampsteadtheatre.com