Parlour Song

I was really enjoying this new play at the Almeida, when shortly after nine the lights went down and the audience applauded what I assumed was the end of act one.  Then the cast of three came on to take their bows and I realised it was all over.  What a let-down.  I have a real beef about the increasingly common 90-minute play.  It's not so much that I feel I didn't get my money's worth last night;  I paid only six pounds for a restricted view seat at the Almeida, though with travelling time my evening out lasted more than five hours, only one and a half hours of which were spent in the theatre.  Plays that stop at the interval quite often are two-acters in which the writer has created the set-up but has failed to work out what should happen next.  Even very good playwrights suffer from the 90-minute syndrome -- think of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer or Edward Albee's The Goat, seen in the West End in recent years.  Both of these were plays that juddered to a halt just as they were about to get interesting.

Jez Butterworth is a gifted writer with lots of imagination and an ear for dialogue, and I loved The Night Heron at the Royal Court about six years ago.  This was a two-acter set in a spooky corner of East Anglia among marginalised religious fanatics, sustained by a wonderful use of language but spoiled by a muddled ending that involved the incursion of lots of new characters.  Something of the same structural weakness is evident in Parlour Song;  my own very limited experience of playwriting suggests that it's quite useful to work out the ending of the play first and work backwards into act one. 

As in The Night Heron and The Winterling, also produced at the Royal Court, Butterworth creates a strong sense of place.  Parlour Song is set on a new-build estate where every house is identical, where young suburban couples share barbecues with their neighbours, and everyone lives cheek by jowl.  Ned (Toby Jones) is a demolition expert who seems to be racked by demons;  he confides his problems to his neighbour Dale (Andrew Lincoln), who owns a string of car washes staffed by Kosovans.  In between them is the enigmatic figure of Ned's wife Joy (Amanda Drew).  So far, so Harold Pinter.  This is definitely a play where there's a weasel under the cocktail cabinet, and lots of subtext and unexplained occurrences.  Why can't Ned sleep at night?  Why are things going missing from his house and his garage, starting with cufflinks and ending up with a birdtable?  Why does Joy make huge quantities of home-made lemonade and then pour it down the sink?  Some of it is very funny in a Terry-and-June sort of way, particularly a scene where Ned listens in bed through his headphones to a CD giving him sex tips on how to use his tongue, and another scene where he works out with weights.  Toby Jones is unfortunately too funny for the play's good, and though the audience is in stitches, the menacing weasel is allowed to curl up and go to sleep.  Of the three actors, Andrew Lincoln seems most at home in his role while I couldn't quite believe in Jones as an anally retentive demolition contractor.  Amanda Drew, whom I've seen and admired in Damages at the Bush and in Blithe Spirit, is a top-class actress but seems to be reluctant to commit herself fully to the role of Joy.  I think that hint of hesitation is the author's fault, not hers.  Joy has some bizarre lines to say: 'I'm already in discomfort, Edward' is her response when turning down Ned's offer of jam roly-poly.  It's a line that could have come from the lips of Alison Steadman's Beverley in Abigail's Party.  At other times she's very much the sexy Pinteresqe mystery woman, perhaps too classy for this new-build cul-de-sac.  I was hoping that Act Two would allow her to shed a bit of the mystery and explain what happened to the missing cufflinks and the birdbath, but I was disappointed.  The play is partly narrated by Dale, but Dale isn't being entirely truthful.  He's an unreliable narrator when it comes to his own relationship with Joy, and we don't see his own wife and children on stage at all. Altogether it's not a wasted evening, but I think Jez Butterworth is better at starting plays than finishing them.

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