Brighton Year-Round 2024

Sam Holcroft Rules for Living

New Venture Theatre, Brighton

Genre: Comedy, Contemporary, Dark Comedy, Theatre

Venue: New Venture Theatre Upstairs

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Ex-scientist Sam Holcroft demurs her comedy Rules for Living – premiered in 2015 at the National’s Dorfman – is truly Ayckbourn-esque: she just aspires to master some of his technique. And praises a human depth her farce can’t accommodate by its very nature.  It’s Season’s Greetings for robots. Directed by Martin Malone it lands softly at New Venture’s Upstairs till December 14^th.

Yet Holcroft started with a serious play, building characters. Only later did she add external triggers when banana skins arrived. Her experience with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is key: knowing what makes you act automatically on a demented ego-bout that winds down. How to get off it, become yourself, is what CBT’s about. Who switches off lights that flash every time a character is about to act – in character.  Less game show, more shouty comedy of manners.

Michael Folkard’s set splits kitchen and lobby down stage-right, with pink and mint. The magnificent detailed kitchen is where everything happens. Flashing signs “Matthew must sit down to tell a lie” flash stage-left, audience-angled in Strat Mastoris’ superb lighting rig (shout out to co-rigger Chris Dent and the operators too), , that covers kitchen dimmers. Malone’s sound follows through an Ayckbourn feel, a play with labels.

Christmas brings rituals, but Holcroft’s pushed this by creating a stereotypical family scenario outmoded by the 1970s. It allows stock characters to bounce off neatly.

Two lawyers with wife and girlfriend respectively return to their parents, where the old Judge is to resume his reign of terror, straight out of hospital. Eldest son Adam (James Hammond) had played cricket for England, Matthew (Thomas Dee) had acting talent. Both are solicitors but clever Adam only publishes articles; Matthew’s snaffled a partnership. Yet they never wanted law. Tim Blissett’s Judge Francis snuffed them out, for the best of reasons. Blissett has few lines but glowers and erupts where no-one expects him to.

Francis has not yet returned for most of the first act. Maggie Clune’s Edith presides, a glacially welcoming, immediately wrong-footing mother, desperate to control because “if you haven’t got anything nice to say” you might tell the truth. Clune’s excellent at nuancing Edith’s menace, thrilling in an ultimate explosion. She shoos hapless actor Carrie (Carla Matthews) into carrot-slicing. This is Matthews’ portrayal of a people-pleasing but scratch-me—and-I’ll-perform wind-up doll. Matthews simmers in the most extrovert yet mechanical role, breaking into dignity by the end.

She’s with younger brother Matthew, Dee’s evasively charming chimera, consummately realised. Matthew’s apparently solid but like his mother keen to manage others’ sincerity. Like Carrie too he’s a people-pleaser, but very different: he lies telling Carrie he loves her when he desires elsewhere, and everything imaginable sitting down. It’s his trademark just as Carrie’s is dancing about (where Holcroft loses it a little).

Adam’s by contrast an embittered ex-contender complaining his father gave him the wrong advice about pace. That this foreshortened his career is ludicrous; yet Hammond’s broken gramophone convinces us “the general” as Adam terms him might have programmed Adam and Matthew. Hammond’s final speech laying all about him seems where the real drama begins. It’s superb. Adam is a rounded, flawed yet on occasion radiantly self-knowing man who sees his faults as he does everyone else’s. Hammond makes the most of knife-edge Adam who sees everything including wife and daughter slipping away.

Rose Marfleet’s Sheena is equally self-knowing. Mostly off-stage daughter Emma suffers allergies directly related to her parents’ disharmony, we’re told. Sheena can see this just as clearly as she wants to pop pills in Emma’s mouth or take her some gluten-free diet as she herself drinks every available glass of red. Marfleet’s clarity makes Sheena believable despite such foibles, or with every argument calibrated around winning cases, like her own lawyer family. Sheena’s able to turn on ferociously articulate Adam and silence him. Their sparring is a highpoint; especially when the pop-up CBT announcements begin to fade into audience cues (we’ve been programmed, and where to laugh). It’s where the play’s small ticking heart begins to pump and not whirr.

By the close we realize as lights switch off who’s broken through, who’s merely a broken record. Some will be irritated with the mechanics of this, but the cast are uniformly excellent and Hammond and Marfleet seize on their parts. Oak Faun’s question as Emma at the climax is a clever release of a trope that one person described as drama exercises.

Perhaps: but no-one’s managed them like this. It’s a variation worth nailing, not least because it interrogates a therapy many believe works. So whether it does or not, questioning why we slip into the behaviours we do is worth asking, more than once. And more than worth seeing in this first-class NVT cast and production.

Directed by Martin Malone, Production Manager Pat Boxall, Stage Manager Moon Berglind.

ASMs Claudia Ezraeelian, Natalie Sacks-Hammond and Guy Dixon.

Set Design Michael Folkard, Set Construction & Painting Tomasz Baraniecki, George Walter, Sam Deards, Simon Glazier, Leah Mooney, Michael Folkard, Kesley Lyon.

Lighting Design Strat Mastoris, Lighting Rigging Strat Mastoris & Chris Dent, Lighting Operation Alex Epps and Will Neal

Sound Design Martin Malone

Sound Operation Philip Castle

Properties Carrie Hynds, Cast and Crew, Specialist Properties Karl Petrie

Fight Director Moog Gravett

Poster Martin Malone, Programme Tamsin Mastoris

Publicity Photography Strat Mastoris and Martin Malone

Publicity & Social Media Annabelle Fenton and Greg Donaldson

Health and Safety Ian Black.

Many thanks to Katie Brownings, Bryony Weaver, Michel Benny, Olive Tullett, Oak Faun for the loan of the wheelchair and Box Office FOH and Volunteers

Published December 7, 2024December 7, 2024 by Simon Jenner