Playwright Amy Herzog’s Obie award-winning oblique tribute to her grandmother is admirably underplayed. The real-life Leepee Joseph is incarnated here as 91-year-old Vera Joseph, whose autumn days in her Manhattan apartment are interrupted by the arrival of her 21-year-old grandson Leo at the end of a transcontinental cycle journey on which his best friend was killed in an accident. Over ten scenes and 85 minutes we see their respective refusals to knuckle under to either family or social expectations, and the everyday problems engendered by their attitudes.
    
Apparently we also see a gradual convergence and mutual understanding between them, though I have to say that all I noticed was an early established tone of mutual fondness punctuated throughout by minor misunderstandings and not particularly developing in any conspicuous direction. Vera might perhaps acquire a glimmer of understanding of the need to acknowledge her declining faculties, and Leo to set at least a single foot in the conventional world they both instinctively repudiate. However, any personal bonding strikes me as both less palpable and less interesting than the continuing differences and separations both from each other and from third parties: the generation between them, Vera’s elderly neighbour (unseen), or Leo’s ex-in-the-course-of-the-play-girlfriend and his subsequent one-night pickup. It seems to me that the keynotes of the principals’ attitudes – the dogmatism of Vera’s Fifties Communism, the detached non-participation of Leo’s more contemporary alternativism – in some ways mirrors the America outside the single room of Simon Kenny’s set and the slow flaking apart of that country, not catastrophically but entropically.
    
Sara Kestelman knows exactly how to throw away her lines and moods to best effect, how to abjure any hint of over-dramatisation. Daniel Boyd’s Leo learns much from Kestelman, but not, alas, how to vary his vocal cadence patterns: every line of his has the same music. James Dacre’s production for the Ustinov Studio in Bath comes into London shortly before he takes up his new position as artistic director of the Royal and Derngate theatres in Northampton; his sure touch with small and medium-sized enterprises shows no signs of abating here. Yet in the end, admirable though Herzog’s grandmother would appear to have been, the play needs a more substantial undertow than simply that she misses her.

Written for the Financial Times.