THE OPEN HOUSE
Ustinov Studio, Bath
Opened 29 November, 2017
****

Since his retirement from the artistic helm of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Michael Boyd’s work has included a number of modest but beautifully pointed presentations in the Theatre Royal, Bath’s studio space, of which this is the latest. (It moves on to the Print Room in London in the new year.)

It begins as a dysfunctional-American-family portrait par excellence. Father, Mother, Daughter, Son and Uncle (the characters have designations, not names) sit awkwardly in a living room, notionally celebrating a wedding anniversary but in fact enduring the Father’s venomous, sarcastic curmudgeonliness as well as their own individual unease. Each suffers some pain or other in their hand: a trapped nerve for the Mother, a splinter for the Uncle, hemiplegia for the wheelchair-bound Father recovering from a stroke. It’s agonising, of course, but also carries an unremitting pitch-black humour.

“Someday,” sighs the Daughter, “we are not gonna be like this any more.” Sure enough, around halfway into the 80-minute piece, the transformations start. For this is a play by Will Eno, a master of surface randomness and deeper intricacy. Characters leave one by one, in more or less sombre mood; then, one by one, the actors re-enter as a realtor, handyman and a family viewing the house as a prospective purchase. Father hadn’t told anyone about his unilateral decision to sell, and even he seems increasingly mystified and finally succumbs to illness himself, so that Greg Hicks can re-appear as a joky, fitness-fanatic new-family member.

These second-phase characters are concerned, candid when abused but fundamentally sympathetic and generally everything the original Daughter could have wished for in terms of “not... like this”. Eno shows us that the same environment can host radically different relationships and temperaments, that nothing is set in stone.

Boyd and his cast work beautifully at portraying both the exquisite mess of the first family and the human warmth of the second without resorting to radically different vocal or physical work. Hicks in his wheelchair dominates the first half and is impressive even though largely silent and bewildered in the second. Eno’s underlying perspective reminds me of the old Samuel Beckett anecdote: “It makes you glad to be alive” – “Well, I wouldn’t go quite as far as that.”

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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