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.