Brighton Year-Round 2024

Muswell Hill

Southwick Players

Genre: Comedy, Contemporary, Drama, Theatre

Venue: The Barn, Southwick

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

January 13th 2010. Whilst a devastating earthquake kills 100,000 in Haiti the shockwaves reach a dinner party more obliquely. Torben Betts’ 2012 play Muswell Hill has enjoyed several revivals. Directed by Gary Cook for the Southwick Players till April 13^th, running at two-hours-ten, it’s a refreshing excursion into recent drama.

Host and hardworking accountant Jess (Lex Lake), supports wannabe novelist Mat (Tom Van Vliet),but shows she’s thinking elsewhere. Hosting a dinner, she’s invited worldly widow Karen (Cat Byrne) whose husband the impossibly grand Julian met a sad end. We gradually find out how. And one-T-Mat’s invited former college mate Simon (Gavin O’Neill), whom he’s not seen for 15 years, and whose opinion he’s sought over his novel on the fashion industry.

Mat’s just read out a damning publisher’s rejection. Simon though mightn’t be the ideal emollient. Monomaniacal, he unlike everyone else rants beyond the “awful” headlines, blames the Americans. And tells truth, especially with wine. Who thought he and Karen might be a fit? Karen retreats on tip-toe as Simon rants downstage, with – in one pretentious moment – his vast preference for Shostakovich ‘s “complexity” over Mozart’s uncomplicated “tunes”. But.

And. Jess’s adopted, vulnerable 23-year-old sister Annie (Amy Whittington) is due. Yet announces a surprise fiancé, bringing 60-year-old lothario theatre director Tony (Anthony Leigh) who’s convinced her she can act. She’s even got as far as a recall: but gives two auditions (another offstage) without waiting for it.

Martin Oakley’s excellent kitchen set places an island centre-stage where one disadvantage is cutting off some sight-lines unless you’re on raked seating. It’s lovingly detailed with two-toned walls (as if different kitchens) with a vast screen in the middle. We find out why in the last moments.

Oakley designs striking lighting too: I’m not sure we need the on-off light-show of scene-changes, but there’s no doubting the design quality. Gary Cook’s sound references music the host couple might enjoy, haunted with lyrics.

Betts’ play operates in duets and trios as people drift in and out of the kitchen to the offstage dining-room. Raucous laughter in the next room punctuates angst onstage. There’s tensions between Simon and everyone, compulsive womaniser Tony who tries it on with others; and out-quotes Simon or Mat where possible (and rapport with Simon in a moment of mutual Marvell); even with Seneca over Socrates. Annie renders her Cleopatra with impressed extras; and Sally’s ‘As long as ‘e needs me’ from Oliver! excruciatingly dispatched.

Backstories land in the second act, sometimes with the thud of a single word: “Daddy!” We see how Simon explodes yet Karen placates. How Tony’s advances unravel, as he’s phoned; along with a contempt for little Britishness. He has this in common with Simon, for opposite reasons. Annie – who thinks she might be a wife – slowly dissolves. And a state of marriage is exposed.

In Betts’ superb Invincible, the lines of disconnect are clearly drawn. Faults here are the play’s, not the hard-working cast. Of these Byrne’s excellent Karen is alive to every shrug and tiptoe as she shimmies into the quixotic, outré yet wise Karen: someone who knows why men in her life behave as they do. Byrne invests Karen with an elusive inner life.

As does Leigh with Tony. A man skimming over people with transatlantic assurance, yet loosing his tongue in contempt of things he earlier praises. He’s capable of recovering his own bottle of wine and mockingly flourishing it on exit. It’s one he long ago predicted almost as he arrives with: “Exit, pursued by a bear” as he confides to Mat – of Mat’s wife.

Van Vliet’s Mat is an underwritten part for a Mat with much to be modest about. Van Vliet does what he can to make his hurt throb into mute life. Lake, so memorable in an outstanding production of Little Wars at Brighton Little last October, animates coping, repressed Jess: simmering silences as she confronts Tony, frustration with Mat.

O’Neill’s Simon rasps into rhodomontade, humanising the “all-round bastard’ he states Simon is. It’s not quite that bald, as Betts hinges much on what Simon, and to a degree Karen, stand for. Whittington’s Annie arrives like a halogen light in the midst of a candlelit vigil. She’s uproarious from the start, so we see less vulnerability.

Betts stakes everything on a fade where the news finally breaks through. It suggests we take Simon more seriously, but Betts hasn’t allowed this to percolate more gradually.

Betts taps into self-regard and the rich state-of-the-dinner-table play. Christopher Hampton’s 1975 The Philanthropist is a prototype: the outside in civil war as the party implodes. There’s a way of taking the nation’s temperature that insists London’s best placed for it.

In 1972 John Mortimer presented TV 30-minute plays – Mill Hill (available on YouTube), Bermondsey, Marble Arch, Knightsbridge, Edwin and The Wrong Side of the Park (full-length, mounted here in 1972). And from 1999 there’s Notting Hill.

These are satirical or comedic. As Betts aims for something more, Ryan Craig’s devastating 2011 The Holy Rosenbergs shows how bringing the world into a London family can sing. Nevertheless, Cook and team have shown commendable disregard for comfortable options, sharing a rediscovery. That’s worth celebrating and supporting to their next production.

Published April 11, 2024April 11, 2024 by Simon Jenner