FringeReview UK 2024

Leaves of Glass

Lidless Theatre and Zoe Weldon in association with Park Theatre and Theatre Deli

Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Park Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Philip Ridley’s 2007 Leaves of Glass is a four-hander that sets truth against memory, false memory, lies and self-deception to shatter truth. And yet by the end the glass leaves of the title are evoked: leaf by purchased leaf, an image of delicacy, betrayal and memorial.

It’s given a first-rate revival at the Park Theatre directed by Max Harrison in association with Lidless Theatre, Zoe Weldon and Theatre Deli. Anyone interested in tense, stripped-down drama (this lasts 110 minutes straight through) should seek this out.

It’s aided by Kit Hichcliffe’s sinewy costume and set: a simple gleaming black rectangle lit by a surround with four black benches and minimal props. Nothing distracts.

27-year-old responsible elder brother Steven (Ned Costello) contemplates the day his father held the hands of both his and his younger brother Barry (Joseph Potter) tight. Barry, now a 22-year-old drink-troubled artist who flunked Goldsmith’s but attracts enormous interest, needs him, lying on the floor with a bucket of vomit. He was his father’s favourite, but Steven’s fine: he’s his mother’s and she’s still alive.

Soon, Steven explains to wife Debbie (Katie Eldred) who at 32 finds the clock ticking on maternity and marriage, he can patch Barry up. As he does to mother Liz (Kacey Ainsworth) always ready to hear her responsible elder son helming a cleaning firm.

Steven’s generous to Barry, OCD perhaps (that cleaning) with “pay peanuts and get monkeys” mantra always at the ready when his prices are challenged; yet staring at a cement mixer instead of his striking wife. He doesn’t have the words for “congratulations” and Debbie even pleads: “A kiss would be nice.” But babies weren’t part of Steven’s plans just yet.

Ridley’s play is suffused with versions and memory-skewed actions. Most monologues are Steven’s and we often see the drama through his eyes, several of which are inward, troubled and finally include a ghost. Debbie gets one speech, but essentially this responsible brother can exhibit violence after simmering build-ups: hits his pregnant wife in the face, tears up his brother’s drawings knowing they’re hugely saleable. Yet his mother easily believes the opposite. And occasionally Debbie goes along with the story she’s left the house because there’s rats.

But these, dark as they are wouldn’t be so revelatory. What makes Leaves of Glass so psychologically devastating is both the way an accident involving a child (the wandering child survives, Steven nearly doesn’t, swerving him) suddenly haunts Steven. Who sees a ghost of a child who’s not died. Why

It’s ingeniously wedded to the other narrative where Steven and Barry swap roles as now Barry’s the one rescuing a catatonic Steven from a cellar: until Steven turns tables and the two confront each other with what happened to both their father and to Barry.

Costello’s all nervy control, revealing frightening outbursts – shout out to fight and intimacy co-ordinator Lawrence Carmichael  here. But equally there’s a troubled unravelling of his own guilt over his father, who showed a creative bent, and whose writing Steven’s rescued literally from flames. The other roles to an extent revolve round him.

Eldred’s Debbie  enjoys agency and presence though gradually losing the battle of attention and her marriage as Steven’s family demons and other triggers push him further away. There’s a terrific scene where Alex Lewer’s lighting – striking here as elsewhere in the cellar scene – is used by Debbie as a metaphor for on/off attention.

Ainsworth’s Liz is a bundle of bustle and denial, easily led, even gaslit by her blind love for Steven and belief that Barry can never do right. There’s a shocking example of her actions in Barry’s childhood she outright denies. And later celebrates the opposite.  But there’s depth too, a deracination – brokered by Steven – from her old neighbourhood, she’s trapped in an airless squeaky-clean flat. Cleaned up by her eldest.

Potter’s Barry is more free-flowing, from flailing distressed drunk to empowered artist and someone in charge of his life, with exhibitions in Manchester and tomorrow the world. Potter allows Barry’s essential warmth to radiate – something Steven’s clearly jealous of to the extent of suspecting his wife – but also such damage to make Barry want to get to the other side of the universe.

Barry’s swivel to self-affirmation is hard-won, fragile and chillingly twisted back on itself confronting the very brother he’s trying to rescue. By the end of the scene their positions are almost changed as Steven feeds of him: but Barry exacts a terrifying truth. Ridley asks questions about what destruction non-creative members of a family will visit on creative ones.

The denouement with that invocation of the title, is a sucker-punch. This is possibly Ridley’s masterpiece. Always exercised by the spectral presence of something just out of eyeshot, he never lets that intrude. Scorching and necessary, Leaves of Glass delves into family toxicity, ceaselessly dragging us back into the past.

Published January 19, 2024January 19, 2024 by Simon Jenner