FringeReview UK 2024

Don’t Destroy Me

Two’s Company and Karl Sidow in Association with Tilly Films

Genre: Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Arcola Theatre Studio 1

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

A revival of a first play written in 1956 by a seventeen-year-old (and premiered when he was still seventeen) might seem a tusk-toggle on that duffle-coated year. But Two’s Company have done just that at the Arcola’s Studio 1. Michael Hastings’ ambitious eight-hander Don’t Destroy Me directed by his recent champion Tricia Thorns runs till February 3^rd.

Michael Billington’s right. Hastings is the great missing writer of theatre. And this is a great way in: the return of 15-year-old Hungarian-Jewish emigré Sammy Kirz (Eddie Boyce) to his reluctant father and young second wife, encountering a Brixton house of other war-torn Jewish renters from warm-hearted Mrs Miller. PTSD, denial, alienation, mental trauma that includes the death of partners in war. Who knew? Not enough of us.

Known for three early plays nurtured by George Devine of the Royal Court, with a fourth only eight years later, above all for Tom and Viv (1984) and The Emperor (1987), Hastings really needs a season. His migration to Somerset Maugham-awarded novels, biographies, along with a refusal to repeat himself, plays set in Africa and Brazil where he worked: all this conspired to keep Hastings out of fashion. One of his few recurring themes though is mental distress – here for instance, as well as famously in Tom and Viv.

August 1956: Alex Marker’s set is a shabby-genteel brown living toom with sofa and table. A skeletally transparent front door and importantly, stairs lead to a mint-green gallery above with a corridor and another tenant’s door. Neil Brinkworth’s lighting manages gulphs of shadow essential for stairwells.

Shani Kirz (Nathalie Barclay), 29 for the past two years, is terminally irritated with her fifty-something husband Leo Kirz (Paul Rider) whom she married to get out of Hungary after his first wife died giving birth to farmed-out Sammy.

And it’s Shani who wants Sammy back. Taking her cue from Sammy’s sense of dislocation, she ultimately organises a visit from the Rabbi (Nicholas Day) an uproarious climactic set-piece where all characters are drawn in, though one remains upstairs.

Carla Joy Evans’ costumes remind you of record covers: up-to-the-1956-minute burnt orange halter-neck for Shani, distinctly down-at-heel for others, except the 1940s-house look of distrait upstairs neighbour Mrs Pond (Alix Dunmore) and her 17-year-old daughter Suki Pond (Nell Williams, known for Game of Thrones) in wannabe-debutante swirls from a decade on. Both aspire to a fashion just out of reach: Shani knows exactly what allures. There’s a shimmying change of costumes too.

In Shani’s case allure means primarily her ongoing affair with chancy bookie George Stoud (Timothy O’Hara), soi-disant party-starter whom even Shani recognises as worthless, turf-obsessed and merely lustful. Even George though in Hastings’ hands shows flickers of warmth and redemption.

What’s striking about this collision of neighbours is Hastings’ valuing each character; most getting the chance for a duet or conversation with everyone else, each time peeling plot layers. For instance George enjoys a revealing moment with Mrs Miller (Sue Kelvin) which advances our knowledge of the Ponds as well as both George’s better side (his tango with Kelvin’s Miller is a theatrical highlight, as is another with Suki and Sammy). That’s as well as edgier ones with Mrs Pond and Suki.

It’s Sammy’s eyes we often see this through. Boyce in his stage debut navigates with superb aplomb from uncertain teen to someone expressing racking emotion at his father’s lack of connection, fury at his trying to break his beloved jazz records. Every time he puts on a record too, it’s stopped. And Sammy’s stalled too, unenthralled with his father’s shoemaking business.

Despite not wanting to see his step-mother’s affair, Sammy sashays with a growing certainty of what he doesn’t want: namely the affable rabbi’s circumscribed bonhomie, beautifully observed by Day. The rabbi himself grows increasingly uncomfortable after Leo returns uninvited, drunk, but truthful. There’s just a touch of Rebel Without a Cause in this father/son moment, and none the worse for absorbing a trope and making it your own, if that’s what Hastings did.

There’s first-rate performances too from Rider whose gravitas paradoxically increases with Leo’s drunkenness, and hopeless gestures (strikingly, a three-balloon image) ultimately turning him from a neglectful loser to something more. Barclay’s mix of bustling solicitude and languorous boredom edgily suggests Shani’s more drawn to Sammy than she admits, but it’s all nuanced. O’Hara too navigates a mean streak with surprising filaments of warmth.

Kelvin bustles radiantly as Mrs Miller trying to impress the rabbi; her exasperation mixed with regret at Mrs Pond’s withdrawal is touching. Dunmore’s character seems a surrealist’s take on Ophelia, painted by Paul Nash. Whilst some of her images are literally painted on – butterflies she asserts steal their wings from petals – Hastings portrays a former fille de joie as Mrs Pond might see herself, with sympathy, pathos, even humour. And there’s a distinct DNA twist where Suki refers to herself as a caterpillar.

Suki though at 17 immature and fanciful, too much her mother’s neglected yet smothered daughter, asserts her truth. Williams floats her gently to the ground. In a final affirmative speech – a touch too adult suddenly – Suki provides the one moment of affirmation you hope might come. She, like Leo (who instead contemplates suicide) opens an imaginary window where Dominic Bilkey’s sound just hints traffic noise, to show Sammy what he should be aiming for. Though his “What world? What wonder?” is negative there’s hope too.

This brilliantly nervous, unresolved play of at least seven lives seeking balance is an astonishing feat, uniquely chronicling the lives of refugees only three months after Osborne’s equally rent-infused Look Back in Anger:  and with the same unsettling refusal to closure. A must-see.

Published January 16, 2024 by Simon Jenner