Anthem for doomed youth? Don’t Destroy Me, Arcola Theatre

Eddie Boyce and Nell Williams

All children whose parents have been busted up by war – never are the same. We’re a special breed.

Offie Award winning Two’s Company are known for restaging almost forgotten plays and in this case have revived Don’t Destroy Me by pioneering Jewish writer Michael Hastings written and first performed in 1956 and steeped in the post-war Jewish experience in ways that, sadly remain ever pertinent across the divides of faith and secular politics. This is the first time the play has been staged since.

One of the characters, a 17-year-old woman called Suki (Nell Williams, part of a very strong and experienced cast) keeps on insisting that there is a world outside the windows of the claustrophobic Brixton apartment block where the actions take place but you’d barely know it such is the pressure the older generations apply to their children and to each other. 

Almost everyone is still traumatised by the war a decade after it was finished and the full truth of its atrocities became known. Some bury themselves in routine or trust in the old faith whilst some self-medicate with excessive alcohol and there are those who have simply lost their minds. Troubled by his own upbringing and post-war disappointments, Hastings, was just 18 at the time he wrote this play, and, as William Burrows once said, tried to write himself out of it… There are no easy answers: it is a fiercely honest play and one that refuses to offer the audience the false comforts of a simple resolution.

Paul Rider, photo from Phil Gammon

Given the age of the playwright, it’s entirely fitting that young Eddie Boyce, makes their professional stage debut as Hastings Sammy and what a splendid job he makes of it too. Sammy is 15 and returning to his father Leo (Paul Rider) after growing up in Croydon with his aunt. Leo lives unhappily married to Shani (Natalie Barclay) who is just 29 (or possibly 31) and a generation younger. She married Leo out of convenience, a means to escape Hungary after the war whilst Leo wanted a “mother” for his son after his mother died. The two live in unhappy disharmony, sniping at each other as she relishes her leisure time and he drinks to forget the daytime and the disasters of the past.

But they are just two of the inmates in this odd tenement with a mentally disturbed mother, Mrs Pond (Alix Dunmore) living in the top flat with her daughter Suki with the two almost incapable of connecting. Mrs Pond lost her husband or lover near the end of the War and as her exasperated landlady and former best friend Mrs Miller (Sue Kelvin) says, words just won’t stick in her head and no conversation is ever run to neurotypical rules as Mrs Pond’s mind moves in and out of focus.

Completing the household is George (Timothy O’Hara) a happy-go-lucky bookie who is more than happy to make the most of his luck with Shani. He’s forever popping into his neighbour’s flat much to Leo’s chagrin who shoos him off and then goes for a "walk", straight to the pub.

Into this mix is added young Sammy whose addition to the family is quickly problematic as Leo cannot seem to communicate with him especially over his choice of boisterous jazz records. Shani has the opposite issue as, far nearer Sammi’s age but still a half-generation distant, she over communicates and smothers him with advice and good intentions. Trying to find his way Sammi asks for the local Rabbi (Nicholas Day) to visit and them events really do intensify as preparations are made, arguments are had and tea, cake and sandwiches prepared… The problem for Sammi – and Suki – is if the grown-ups are not only stuck in the past but unwilling to move on, what future can there be for them?

Eddie Boyce and Nicholas Day All shots by Phil Gammon. 

IThankYou Theatre Rating: ****

This is an outstanding debut play from Hastings and if it drifts from time to time over the two hours running time is swiftly gets back on track. As the youngest and possibly angriest of the emerging Angry Young Men – John Osborne was 27 at this point – the playwright has a lot of anger to express and is forcefully on point for the inability to escape the past, consolidate the now and work out a future that isn’t just a tribute act for the societal mores of a generation subsumed in conflict and loss.

Tricia Thorns directs with a forensic eye for period sensibilities and choreographs her players so well in the playing area created by Alex Marker’s inventive set design: they not only fit the interior of a Victorian townhouse into the Arcola stage, but make us all feel apart of it, almost embarrassed by the family truths and discomforts played out closely in front of us. 

Eddie Boyce is extraordinary in this position and it’s not understatement to say that he does not look out of place in this highly skilled and forceful set of players!

Don’t Destroy Me runs at the Arcola until 3rd February and I’d recommend you check out their website immediately for tickets and more information.

Eddie Boyce, Timothy O'Hara and Nathalie Barclay. Shot, Phil Gammon.

Alix Dunmore and Sue Kelvin. Photo Phil Gammon.

Childhood’s end… The Good John Proctor, Jermyn Street Theatre

I never thought you but a good man, John, only somewhat bewildered…

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

‘Tis the season for hunting witches, when is it ever not? Evil is everywhere, as the young women featured in Talene Monahon’s play keep on repeating and yet here it’s an obscure thing only dimly conceived in the minds of children in what amounts to a prequel to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Monahon’s script cleverly avoids all obvious allusions with only passing references made to modern witchery made in a discourse conducted in the modern idioms of a high school friends.

The characters are some of the women who make the fateful accusations in Miller’s play and they have been taken back to the actuality of their youth, Abigail Williams in The Crucible is 17 but here she’s played as 12 by the excellent Anna Fordham and her cousin and best friend Betty Parris, played with child-like nuance by Sabrina Wu, is just nine. This is the age they were when in 1692 they made their accusations against over two dozen of their fellow villagers in Salem including the good John Proctor.

The story takes place largely in the year before the witch trials and begins in the bedroom of the cousins as Betty relates a dream she’s had about flying through the woods, “like an owl” an exhilarating dream of freedom that her cousin advises her not to relate. Keeping a secret is difficult for a nine-year-old but Abigail knows already that accusations of witchcraft are all to easily made.

Sabrina Wu and Anna Fordham - all photographs by Jack Sain

Their friend Mercy Lewis (the vibrant Amber Sylvia Edwards) is 14 and knows all about the world including the fact that it is full of evil and, seemingly, large numbers of her fellow citizens are in congress with The Devil even though they still go to church the next day as if the rather florid descriptions of Old Nick worship she presents should leave them exhausted. Where has she learned all these lurid rumours? The play seems in no doubt about the corruption of these innocents. 

Abigail gets a job with the Proctor family much to her cousin’s despair - why are all the people we love dead or working? – and she becomes dazzled by her employer, as good a man as she has ever met. But her childish view of his benevolence soon gives us hints of a darker relationship that adds unwelcome depth to the evils of the original play. She has a child’s conception even of this though and either cannot nor will not express her treatment in direct terms. This is the skill of the playwright; understatements serve to highlight the sins of this new world were none stay innocent for long.

Sabrina Wu and Amber Sylvia Edwards, photo by Jack Sain

A new party arrives from Maine, and another without living parents – only Betty’s remain alive or present – Mary Warren (Lydia Larson) who at 18 has seen more of life as can be quickly seen. Lydia Larson is quite remarkable as the sensitive Mary giving the most febrile of performances, her eyes and face alive with meaning and the overwhelming wonder her character finds in the world in general and the woods in particular. Mary has fits when her imagination runs too wild but Lydia presents this lightning potential at all points, as thoughts flicker across her face in contrapuntal flow to her dialogue.

This is one of the wonders of the Jermyn Street Theatre, even with my eyesight you can see the performers at work and this breaks down the barriers you might find up in the expensive Gods of the West End giants round the corner. 

So, it is we see in close quarter how the girls’ exploitation and confusion leads to their seeking even the most outlandish explanations for their helplessness: what good is rationality when you are orphaned and abused. But the play lets us make our own minds up and doesn’t proscribe specific causality just the probabilities of society’s most vulnerable. The evil is throughout society and it is other people.

Anna Ryder's direction allows her performers free rein even as they are tightly choreographed across every inch of the stage.  The soundscaping from Bella Kear has a narrative atmosphere all its own and the lighting design from Laura Howard is superb transforming the JST’s discrete performance space from puritan loft to the deep disorientation of the woods and a quite astonishing moment when the focus shifts from stage to stalls.

Lydia Larson, detail from photo by Jack Sain

IThankYou Theatre Rating: ****

 This is a magical-realist, visceral delight that, literally, turns the spotlight on the audience in terms of our judgement and responsibility to these characters and young people like them. Who makes the “witches”, well, we do, and people very much like us if we’re not very careful. 

The play is being staged as part of the Jermyn Street Theatre’s Footprints Festival and runs from 10^th – 27th January, so I suggest you get your booking in quick. 

Full details of tickets and the rest of the Footprints productions are on the JST website.

I actually can’t believe how wicked this town has become.

Incidentally, my favourite performance of John Proctor came from Tom Wilkinson at the National Theatre in 1990. He was a powerful presence on stage and on screen and it is him I always think of when I think of The Crucible. RIP.