THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
This new play by Beth Steel has some of the best stage writing for some time. It fuses the social conscience of a JB Priestley state-of-the-nation play with Greek tragedy and is leavened with the wit you’d hear in Coronation Street. It is both epic and intimate.
In Labyrinth Steel examined the world of high finance and in Wonderland she delved, brilliantly, into the emotional traumas left behind by the miners’ strike. Here, she returns to those Midlands roots with a powerfully vivid and engaging family drama which examines how the shifts in Britain’s industrial landscape have shaped the lives of ordinary people and in particular its impact on the women. It ends on Brexit and how we might have got there.
This is no hectoring polemic though, and it's laced with comedy which helps lay bare the many emotional truths. Over five decades (from 1965 to 2019) we visit the working class Webster family. The father Alistair (Stuart McQuarrie) is a quiet, dutiful, factory shop steward in the big local employer and is so fully absorbed in his committees, and mired in middle-aged inertia, that he has let his marriage turn sour.
Anne-Marie Duff, in a career best performance, is glorious as the wife Constance. Practically exploding with fury and frustration at the hidebound existence of women like her at that time, she spends her days keeping house for husband, three offspring and a widowed grandmother. She craves glamour, excitement and escape and drops impeccable Bette Davis one-liners (you can imagine Bette playing an American version). She dulls the pain with gin and lush ballads from Hollywood movies that she either plays or performs (and Duff sings them exquisitely). The piece often recalls Dennis Potter with that world of kitchen sink realism sweetened by the sepia-tinged warmth of old Standards from the '40s and '50s songbook. It doesn’t hold back, either, on how simmering domestic squabbles can explode and how that in turns scars and divides the offspring forced to witness it.
Kelly Gough shines too as the daughter Agnes. Her trajectory from carefree kid to an impoverished zero-hours warehouse worker is incredibly poignant and Michael Grady-Hall impresses as her troubled brother Jack. He journeys from grating teenage Communist to Tory tycoon. His huge warehouse enterprise replaces the old factory and his ‘betrayal’ is the focal point for many a family row, especially with his sister. But these are never labored, and Steel brilliantly captures how families, even ‘non-political’ ones, are totally shaped by the political world around them.
The fate of teenage daughter Laura (Emma Shipp), who undergoes a horrific DIY clothes-hanger abortion, has powerful resonance too in the month that Roe v. Wade has burst back into the headlines. Laura’s tragic fate, dictated by Constance’s desire not to be lumbered, serves as a catalyst for everything else that spins out of control.
The naturalism of the piece is tempered too with sequences where the dead also are given a voice and the play has strong resonances of Greek tragedy. Here too, fatal mistakes come back and haunt characters, down the generations. Indeed, the piece starts with the grandfather’s corpse being gently washed as it's laid out by a neighbor. As the play progresses, we see how that character’s demons run riot through the lives of his offspring.
Designer Anna Fleischle’s domestic interior is framed in shadows against the exposed brick of the Almeida, perfectly capturing the claustrophobia of those cramped kitchens. Throughout, Blanche McIntyre’s direction is wonderfully assured and detailed, lending it pace, humor and humanity.
