Peter Viney's Blog

Home, I’m Darling
by Laura Wade

Directed by Tamara Harvey
Designer Anna Fleischle

National Theatre co-production with Theatre Clwyd

Dorfman Theatre, National Theatre
Saturday 1st September 2018, 19.30

CAST:
Katherine Parkinson – Judy
Richard Harrington – Johnny
Kathryn Drysdale – Fran
Sara Gregory – Alex
Barnaby Kay – Marcus
Sian Thomas – Sylvia

Katherine Parkinson as Judy, Richard Harrington as Johnny

Katherine Parkinson has delighted us on TV from The IT Crowd to Hang Ups. Just a couple of days earlier we watched her in The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society on DVD. We couldn’t miss the chance of seeing this, even though getting tickets meant breaking our rule of “never watch two unconnected plays in the same day.” We had long ago booked Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Wanamaker Playhouse for the afternoon, so we were to be in London and at the South Bank. Love’s Labour’s Lost had been a major disappointment, so thankfully Home, I’m Darling was able to lighten our mood!

Someone like me who writes about record collecting is not surprised by people dressing up in retro clothes. Try the JukeBox & Retro Fair at Brighton. You could buy the 1950s records, the clothes and the furniture and even the English Rose kitchen units there. I had an aunt who in 1967 still dressed in the high fashion of her heyday, 1939-1940. With her shoulder padding, she looked as if she’d stepped out of a film. Then in secondhand record shops I often see people dressed in clothes of earlier eras … 1977 punks or 1967 hippies or 1973 glam, and these are people in their early twenties.

The play starts as a domestic idyll in Judy and Johnny’s 1950s home with all the furniture. Judy, the domestic goddess, even takes the top off Johnny’s boiled egg for him. As my companion noted waiting for the play to start, and Judy’s mother says in the script later on, The Fifties didn’t even look like this in the Fifties. It is the 1950s Ideal Home Exhibition house. As we later discover, every part of it has been meticulously curated by Judy from eBay purchases. They even drove from Welwyn Garden City to Sunderland to get the ancient fridge. Our realization dawns when Johnny sets off to work, trilby on his head, and Judy produces her laptop computer from a drawer and starts tapping away. It’s now.

Act Two: three years earlier. They’re stripping the wallpaper to put up 50s paper. Judy has the idea …

As we discover in a flashback start to Act Two, the whole 1950s lifestyle came to Judy three years earlier when she was offered redundancy pay. She loved the style and mood of the 1950s, a reaction to her commune late-hippy upbringing. There are beautiful touches throughout as when she explains to her friend Fran that you can use lemon juice for cleaning taps. That’s a fact she discovered on the internet.

Scene divider: Fran (Kathryn Drysdale) and Marcus (Barnaby Kay)

Throughout the scene division is a choreographed dance-led set-adjustment to music by the “other couple” in the story, Fran (Kathryn Drysdale) and Marcus (Barnaby Kay). They’re a contrast. Marcus is a great jive dancer, and comes to the 1950s through cars – he has a Chevy Bel-Air and an Airstream caravan. But it’s an interest, a hobby, not a lifestyle, most tellingly pointed out when he says he uses the Audi for work. They’ve kept a lid on the 1950s interest. Judy and Johnny haven’t. Fran borrows Judy’s 1950s housewife manual, after saying that the longest recipe she’s used this week is Pierce film lid.

Marcus (Barnaby Kay) and Fran (Kathryn Drysdale)

Judy has decided to revert to her perceived 1950s image of femininity. She will keep a perfect house, clean behind the furniture daily, take off her pretty pinny before Johnny gets home from work, and have his slippers and a cocktail on hand. However, as her mother points out, she has no children to justify this. We learn that they have money problems. Their lifestyle choice started with two incomes.

As an aside, single people in 2018 are severely disadvantaged. Saving up for a deposit for most requires two incomes. I’m not sure that’s so new. With no family money to get us started, Karen and I saved up for two years in the mid 1970s. My salary was what we lived on. Hers went into a building society account towards a deposit on our first flat. It takes two. But now there’s only one, and Johnny’s income as an estate agent on commission is falling.

Alex (Sara Gregory) and Judy (Katherine Parkinson). Am I over-dressed?

Johnny pins his hopes on a promotion, so they invite his boss, Alex (Sara Gregory), to cocktails. Judy is dressed up in a fur stole having prepared 1950s dainties like cheese straws and devilled eggs. Alex is young, attractive, assertive and in trousers. Judy worries that Johnny fancies Alex.

Sian Thomas as Sylvia, Judy’s mother

There is a long speech by Judy’s mother, Sylvia (Sian Thomas), ranting about the REAL 1950s and we re-read it afterwards, and on the train home chuckling all the way. Reading the text the day after a play is great. You remember it enough to hear the actors’ voices as you read.  Sylvia’s rant was perfectly delivered, and we loved every word of it. She calls Judy’s world this gingham paradise. All so true – the 50s were crap if you were black, gay or disabled. (Worse if you were all three, I guess!)  As she says, the open fire was the only warm place in a house, and you’d have scarlet burning shins, while the backs of your ears turned crisp with cold.  Karen’s favourite line was:

Sylvia:  Sundays that lasted a month, nothing open. Nothing to do. Church. Freezing. But you couldn’t not go.

Sylvia must be about our age (the text says 67), and her daughter Judy is 38 years old. That’s our daughter’s age … There’s also reference to Judy’s constant changes of frock. She has a vast collection of 1950s clothes, and of course clothes were comparatively vastly more expensive in the 1950s (using the measure of hours worked to buy an item) and such a wardrobe would have been the preserve of the very rich.

Back to the story. Fran turns up during the discussion with Sylvia. It seems Marcus has been suspended for sexual harassment. While Judy commiserates ; everyone is so PC that everybody gets accused for the smallest pat on the back nowadays. Sylvia, almost autistically interrupts to point out that a great deal of it goes on and he might well be guilty. Fabulous.  It rang so many bells. In ELT teaching I was once deputy to a guy in his fifties, and we shared an office. I was twenty-six.  He’d ask homesick young Latin American girls in and say “Sit on my knee and tell me all about it …” then say, “Peter, this is a private conversation. Could you leave the office?” I’d reply that (a) it was in Spanish which I can’t speak and (b) no chance because (c) my being here is saving you from yourself. And mutter “you dirty old pervert.” Speak to women who were shorthand-typists then. There are so many tales of older men who thought they should wear short skirts and sit opposite, or take dictation perched on their knees.

Judy fantasizes that she can become in contrast the perfect 50s secretary to Marcus, without any of this 2018 PC stuff, and invites him round. It’s a wonderful scene with Katherine Parkinson and Barnaby Kay operating two different agendas through the conversation, and it is revealed that Marcus is indeed a total sleaze.

Judy (Katherine Parkinson) dances with Marcus (Barnaby Kay)

Johnny doesn’t get the promotion. He fears that seeing him in his weird lifestyle removed Alex’s respect. Later he confesses that yes, indeed, he fancies Alex. Judy decides she’ll have to sell and downsize, and invites Alex to do a valuation. She begs Alex not to take Johnny away from her, and Alex is totally repelled (Yuk!) at the very thought that Johnny fancies her. In a delicious twist, Johnny gets promoted to another office. We see the subtext – Alex wants to get rid of him.

It ends quite quietly- I think I’d expected a more dramatic finish to events.

Judy & Johnny: money troubles. The letter from the bank

It’s a wonderful play. It brings up so many aspects from the value we place on domestic work, to male-female roles, to what the 50s really were like (and so were the 60s and 70s in the sleaze departments), to the issue of living a fantasy. Not only that, it’s very funny, and never flags for a moment. Katherine Parkinson’s facial expressions are a joy. She conveys how brittle she is behind her facade. How needy, how lacking in confidence … a side effect of being the perfect housewife. The isolation is manifest when we realize that Fran and Marcus are the only people Judy and Johnny really socialize with. It made me think of teacher training in the 80s when so many of the trainees were women who’d taught foreign languages, stopped to have children, then were re-entering the workplace via ELT. It took weeks for their confidence to reassert itself. We can see that in Judy.

FOUND MUSIC

It was all perfectly chosen from Mr Sandman onward. I’ll make my perennial comment that found music should be listed in the programme. Mr Sandman is, and it’s by Pat Ballard, but the others aren’t. I wish I could note them all in deference to the writers. I recall Teenager in Love (Pomus-Schuman). For the next revival, Bobby Darin’s 1958 B-side Judy Don’t Be Moody would be ideal.

THE SET

Upstairs: Johnny. Downstairs: Judy, Fran, Marcus

For acting performances, direction, costume and the play itself, this is a clear five star production. The two-level set is one of the best-looking I’ve seen this year, and it should be a candidate for “Best Set of 2018” … if it had been in a different theatre. The National put it in the Dorfman Theatre, which often functions as three quarters in the round with a long thrust stage. The set is designed for proscenium, and if you’re sitting in the middle area (often it’s the stage in this theatre), it would be fabulous. In the Dorfman a lot of the audience are sideways on. OK, tickets say clearly “Side View” but that covers a lot of the area. We were stage left in the Circle, the middle of three levels, and the one you enter at. The trouble was that the kitchen is extreme stage left, and much of the action takes place there. Add to that is they often position Judy on the stage left side of the kitchen table. Our whole front row was craning over trying to see her. I thought the late-on argument between Judy and Johnny was a knowing pastiche of that 1950s “kitchen sink” genre (so was doubly entertaining) but only on the way out did I see that there actually was a kitchen sink on stage, extreme stage left. Conversely, those sitting stage right, would have had the same issue with the entrance door and characters passing the window to and from it, which we could see clearly.

So, one off for the Dorfman sight lines, but I looked up the seating plan for its initial run at the Theatr Clwyd in Mold and it was obviously perfect in that space.

Given that tickets were very hard to get, and reviews were so good, it would have been better placed in the larger, wide proscenium Lyttelton Theatre rather than the Dorfman. Admittedly that’s too large to feel intimate (which the Dorfman does) but it wouldn’t have compromised the set. A small solution would have been moving the kitchen table four of five feet towards centre, so almost between kitchen and lounge.

However, I’d assume this will be a West End transfer. I’ve always praised the National Theatre’s loos, restaurants, public areas and bookstore compared to those cramped old West End theatres. In this case, most unusually, an old West End proscenium stage will work better.

****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID:

5 star
Dominic Maxwell, The Times *****
Rosemary Waugh, The Stage *****
Chris Bridges, The Londonist *****
4 star
Natalie Haynes, The Guardian ****
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ****
Paul Taylor, The Independent ****
Kay Maltby, The Sunday Times ****
Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard ****
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage ****
Alice Saville, Time Out ****
Sarah Carson, Radio Times ****
Natasha Sutton Williams, Culture Whisper ****
Matt Wolf, The Arts Desk ****
3 star
Quentin Letts, Daily Mail ***
Neil Norman, Daily Express ***

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

LAURA WADE (writer)
The Watsons, Chichester Minerva, 2018
Home, I’m Darling, National Theatre 2018
POSH, Salisbury Playhouse 2015

KATHRYN DRYSDALE
The Ruling Class by Peter Barnes, Trafalgar Studios 2015