FringeReview UK 2025
Jez Butterworth Parlour Song
Greenwich Theatre,
Genre: Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Greenwich Theatre, Greenwich
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
James Haddrell revived Jez Butterworth’s 2012 play The River at Greenwich Theatre last year. His 2008 Parlour Song also opens there, again helmed by artistic director Haddrell till May 24th.
A probing revival, James Haddrell’s production and Emily Bestow’s set inject a haunting into these people. A cooling tower about to implode: it’s Naveed Khan’s gaunt intimation of Ned’s soul that lingers
Review
A building collapses in a pall of smoke. Dale swears. “Look at that. Where are we?” His close neighbour and friend Ned fills him in on the video. “A cooling tower outside Leeds.” Ned’s a demolisher and explains zones: Ned was in the Buffer Zone. Dale, owner of a string of carwashes staffed by Kosovans he adds, can’t compete. Ned though wants to show more demolitions Dale’s already seen. But as items from Ned’s house go missing, including a birdbath, who’s demolishing the demolisher? Who’s in the Buffer Zone? James Haddrell revived Jez Butterworth’s 2012 play The River at Greenwich Theatre last year. His 2008 Parlour Song also opens there, again helmed by artistic director Haddrell till May 24th.
It’s a 95-minute straight-through play foreshadowing Butterworth’s Jerusalem in its radical disaffection. It’s more oblique though, shifting glacially, unfolding rather than driven hurtling to an abyss. Perhaps Butterworth’s most experimental play, it’s tonally more interesting than some more straightforward works. That’s its strength and occasional vulnerability. Like The River and some earlier plays it’s a chamber piece. It revolves round one man’s disturbed interior, and one woman’s unknowability. Pity they’re in the same marriage. Dale is the lightning conductor. Being Butterworth, it’s quirkily funny too, with set-ups and tweaks of menace.
Dale (Jeremy Edwards), Joy (Kellie Shirley) and her husband Ned (Naveed Khan) are neighbours and friends. So is Dale’s wife Lyn, but offstage. The dynamics of these three, often expressed in monologues, slant across such activities as workouts with the men (Ned’s anxious about being out of shape, Dale suggests excercise), scrabble between each man with Joy. Very different kinds of scrabble. Joy cuts her hand slicing lemons for lemonade. But says she threw it all away.
Ned’s perplexed. Dale’s been intrigued a long time and Joy likes that. Dale, written as blokeish but with warmth (brought out winningly by Edwards) has a couple of nuanced monologues, but he’s somehow removed from reflection. Edwards navigates the determinedly different language, the demotic slides, the asides and subtext cut-aways when with Joy: evading her shark fantasy, her teasing compliments about Lyn (things he doesn’t even know), with comparisons of the view. He’s too jumpy to relax back after an answerphone message from far-off, Travelodged Ned.
Each are solitary. Ned the hugely successful destroyer of histories, even skylines, comments that buildings look innocent just before they go. Their local Arndale Centre is next. But Ned’s having trouble dreaming, waking at 3am ”fragile, volatile” as Dale notes. Khan emits trouble like he’s no longer in the safe area. “Nothing’s going to hurt you in the Buffer Zone” he says wistfully. But the disappearance of even the lawn mower, the shattering of a large padlock, are bound to “wash through” Ned, whom Dale thinks is paranoid. Khan literally stands as if about to fall apart, Ned taking pills he shouldn’t, as Joy discovers. A cooling tower about to implode: it’s Khan’s gaunt intimation of Ned’s soul that lingers.
Joy’s part is underwritten but Shirley makes deft use of silence: removing stockings provocatively whilst her husband talks, telling perfectionist Ned in detail about how his cooking is perfect, since this is easiest. Or confiding in Dale that “you’re the one warm thing I’ve touched for years.” Yet laying down a quiet ultimatum. Can either follow through?
What Shirley manages is the strong whiff of Ruth from Pinter’s The Homecoming: the challenge, the assured sensuality, with Butterworth quirks: Joy’s desire to be eaten quickly by sharks, the tease of her questions. Shirley semaphores Joy’s shadows and makes her turns-away simmer.
Yet even Joy doesn’t know things about Ned he’s confided to Dale, including one disturbing moment when the sleeping Joy mounts him and croaks an unknown word.
Emily’s Bestow’s striking set highlights the compartmentalised lives of the neighbours; in particular Ned’s hiving off everything against another detonation: which might not be sourced from his own dynamite. To a degree it’s Dale’s world too, with Joy alienated, flitting in and out of the space.
That’s a giant blue doll’s house in section faced with named areas in navy blue. Illuminated like some hallucinated board-game there’s projections of Scrabble, diary entries and leaves in Hannah Schlenker’s video design. Like taking a knife, not dynamite to a couple’s intimate life, it’s wittily intrusive. The gestural artificiality contrasts with the stage’s bric-a-brac naturalism often in pristine white: foregrounded with a garage and pop-out bed, where stage-left a smaller work-room is often Dale’s space. Henry Slater’s lighting sluices across or evokes the alien feel of suburbia: summer daze, street lamps.
A probing revival, Hadrill’s production and Bestow’s set inject a haunting into these people. With Khan to the fore, Butterworth’s alienated characters seem forever at a quarter to three. Desires and distress wash over disinhibited. No wonder the set’s mostly midnight-blue with a streak of dawn. Highly recommended.
