The Hills of California – Harold Pinter Theatre

2024 has already been a year of strong new writing led by female characters. In the first days of the year Shakespeare’s Women escaped the confines of their play to find their own agency, the female protagonists of Northanger Abbey got a contemporary upgrade, while last week Beth Steel’s superb Till the Stars Come Down gave women a stake in state-of-the-nation playwriting, so it is with some eagerness that the opening of Jez Butterworth’s new play directed by Sam Mendes, The Hills of California is received, the story of a group of singing sisters played out across a twenty-year divide. A new work from Butterworth is a big moment in London theatre and there will be huge expectations for the press night later this week, as it is seven years since The Ferryman premiered with only a revival of Jerusalem in between. And this new work gets lots of things right – the intimacy of a working class northern family shredded by time, the allure of fame, the compromises by a pushy stage mother and the scale required to tell a story across two time periods where hope festers into regret and lost opportunity, in which the chance to forgive and reconcile curdles in the air. It is a shame, though, that Butterworth blows it all up with final Act that just isn’t worthy of the greater picture he paints.

There is so much to like about The Hills of California and for most of this three Act, three hour drama it is a gripping and beautifully structured time-jump story that takes the audience between two eras – the sweltering summer of 1976 where three sisters, Gillian, Ruby and Gloria, gather at the Sea View guest house in Blackpool waiting for their mother to die, and 1958 where as young teenagers they perform as an Andrews Sisters-like quartet looking for a big break. Each Act spends half its time in each of these decades, first showing the aftermath of their life together, hinting at the long years they’ve spent apart, no longer in each other’s lives before cutting back to their former closeness, the innocence of their younger selves when all that lay before them was opportunity and a world to seize. And what Butterworth has done so well in his earlier dramas is to juxtapose these two ideas, the dream and the reality, to dig into concepts of family and national inheritance that shape the generations, and the same applies to this new work where characters are unable to shake off their background and are doomed to live out the same lives as those who came before.

And both parts of the drama are equally weighted, an approach that is very successful, drawing the audience into their troubles and their striving fruitlessly against their fate, putting 1976 first to quell any false notion of hope for the sisters and the men who surround them. It also introduces the audience to the absence of both the mother Veronica, upstairs taking her final breaths, and eldest daughter Joan whose arrival from California is continually talked of and every moment expected. It’s a great dramatic device and one of the hardest things to do on stage is create an absent-presence, making characters who aren’t in the room feel as vivid, rounded and forceful as if they were – and it is a really interesting idea to then scan backwards to see Veronica in her heyday and never as the wizened and shrunken body she has become. But her presence and personality haunts her grown-up children nonetheless, reluctant to go into her room, knowing they had to show up yet unable to truly reconcile their collective past with the present, the women they have all become so different to their expectations.

So it is in this section of the play that the greatest exposition takes place, giving Ruby and Gloria husbands and children who they seem to care little for but stay with out of habit, fear or a lack of alternative options, while youngest Gillian has remained at home, an unmarried companion to their mother, never leaving Blackpool and with a suggestion of agoraphobia that has confined her to the guest house. Butterworth creates a sense of decline, of the semi-tragic consequences of too many false promises that seems to infect the very walls of this building with its unchanging interior and faded order. Even its name is a lie, a mile from the sea, the cause of several opportunities for humour about unhappy former guests, but it is a place that reeks of death in all its forms as the lives of the Webb family stand still the minute they cross the threshold.

Putting the 1970s first also gives the earlier era an emotive innocence, not only due to the greater restrictions and social expectations of the 1950s but in the way that Butterworth writes about dreams and the experience of children turning into young women, a period in which their personalities are forming and what happens to them here will shape the adults they become, for better or worse. Achieved through a stage revolve designed by Rob Howell, the story that unfolds across two Acts in the 1950s is crisply told and incredibly evocative. Having established what really happens to these women, they are re-introduced as teenagers in the private kitchen with their prim and authoritarian mother who pushes them to practice their harmonies, chastising Joan for being late, and criticising their vocal range. This is the embodiment of mother-knows-best, a world of domestic precision and female power as Veronica maintains a dignified presence as a lone parent and business woman.

There is a carefully constructed interplay between the public and private areas of the guest house as the two things continually overlap, although Butterworth shows that Veronica addresses her errant guests in the same brisk tone as her children, forcefully ordering one long term resident on a 10-minute walk to the front door when he tries to enter through the family kitchen. Here we get a hint of the dynamic between the women forming as the sisters occasionally make the most of their few minutes alone to rebel against their mother’s tastes and expectations by smoking, talking about boys and relaxing into each other’s company, a solid and caring group but with hints that Joan is already becoming wayward. The formulation of the hierarchy we see in the later period of the play is settled here as admirations are fixed and the various dreams and aspirations for their future are discussed.

The strongest writing here is for Veronica, the trajectory across the first two Acts brilliantly managed as a confident parent and entirely controlled public face starts to crumble, revealing unrealistic dreams of her own as well as a much seamier knowledge of how life really happens, something she tries to protect her daughters from with their cutesy 40s girl-group style and specifically innocent choice of songs. When opportunity finally knocks in Act Two, the extent of Veronica’s delusion is fascinatingly unraveled, a women with both too little perspective on her daughter’s talent and the changing face of music in this era, but also the grubbier reality of her compromised adult life, artfully concealed behind her Blackpool front. Here, the audience starts to understand far more about the truths that Veronica has to wrap in lies to make her life more palatable including the husband who may have died in glory in any number of Second World War battles and just what she is prepared to sacrifice to create that fame moment for her girls. And so it becomes the right decision not to include her in the later decade, to allow this contradictory version of Veronica to linger in the audience’s mind where culpability for what happens to all of her children and the dreams she fed them is far murkier.

So it is a shame that the final Act seems to stumble, leaving the audience with insufficient understanding of the three younger sisters or any particular statement about the lives that resulted from their mother’s choice and Joan’s apparent success – an outcome that compares unfavourably with Till the Stars Come Down that had far greater understanding about the effect of being left behind. It opens with a male conversation, the only one in the play, between Gloria and Ruby’s husbands who talk in circles about their spouses and seem to suffer as much as their womenfolk – arguably the play needs an all-male scene to give a broader perspective but very little comes from it and neither character is better understood when they finally go to bed and leave the stage to the sisters for their final showdown.

To explain what happens next and how the show resolves itself would be a major spoiler, but having so carefully laid the groundwork for this over more than two hours, Butterworth’s choice feels overblown and unworthy of the small-scale domestic drama that came before. By the end of what should be an explosive conversation, too little is resolved, whole new plot twists are thrown into the mix, new themes are introduced and the important questions posed at the beginning of the play about what it means to have a dream snatched away, how do women reconcile smaller lives than the ones they hoped for and what is the inter-generational inheritance of both personality and responsibility, are unaddressed. What this section should have done, is remain with its three core characters – Gillian, Gloria and Ruby – let them ruminate on what it was like to have a mother like Veronica and whether she or their long-absent sister Joan let them down and what happens to them once Veronica is really gone. As much as they may welcome the release, there is so much untapped drama in this moment that the play never fulfills by taking its odd tangent. Sometimes on stage it is far more satisfying to leave a big question unresolved and let the smaller questions be enough – as Veronica herself says in Act Two, her daughters could be a trio like The Andrews sisters, you don’t necessarily need the fourth, and Butterworth should have listened to her.

Sam Mendes directs with his usual care, presenting grandeur and intimacy at the same time – a particular characteristic of his work – that here creates a sense of the small family troubles and trials in the two eras as well as the cause and effect between them. Like his work on The Lehman Trilogy, pulses pass between the generations in the The Hills of California and legacies linger longer than individuals which helps to motor a play that only starts to drag in its less elegant final Act. Butterworth’s scene setting requires a physical and claustrophobic sense of that legacy so Howell has created a cluttered set for 1976 filled with strange remnants of a decaying seaside town, the space dominated by a tiki bar and a broken jukebox to underpin the moment that groups like The Andrews Sisters made way for the Rolling Stones and their like.

The central cast is exceptionally good and while the writing doesn’t dig too deeply beneath their surface misery to examine their collective abandonment, Leanne Best as the betrayed and harassed Gloria, Ophelia Lovibond as Ruby who used her looks to hook dull men who might worship her for a while and Helena Wilson as the homely Gillian who inherited her mother’s prim decorum are a convincing family unit with wells of untapped emotion beneath their eroded surface, while Lovibond in particular has a rich 40s-esque jazz vocal. Laura Donnelly is an absolute force as Veronica, the most fully realised character in the show whose desperate aspiration for her girls to have something more emerges from a command of her domestic environment and the stage, while finding layers of vulnerability in a woman who has clung to an impression of herself and a dream she is certain the Webb sisters deserve that prove no more than an illusion.

It is slightly hard luck for this production of The Hills of California that it follows so swiftly on from Till the Stars Come Down, the complexity and breadth of Steel’s play still fresh in the mind slightly exposing the less successful trajectory that Butterworth plots for his own set of female siblings. For two Acts this is a great piece of theatre, a multi-generational tale of lost fortune, shifting social positions and the burden of motherly love, yet strong and engaging as the writing is, Butterworth forgets that there is power in the absences he has created and dramatic satisfaction in leaving his characters and the audience unfulfilled.

The Hills of California is at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 15 June with tickets from £20. Follow this site on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

Shakespeare’s Women – Sam Wanamaker Theatre

The world premiere of a new female-focused play is a great way to start a new theatre year and Lorien Haynes’s piece Shakespeare’s Women is an inventive recasting of the plight of women characters across the canon. Presented as a staged reading for only two performances in the Sam Wanamaker Theatre for the charity Refuge, there is much to take from this early draft of a work that draws out both the universality of Shakespeare’s work and simultaneously points out the widespread violence and damage that is cumulatively visited on women characters in service of male-driven plots and desires. The masterstroke in Haynes’s play is to avoid the sentimental or the lionising of individuals and instead creates rounded, complex and troubled women who, at times, behave as reprehensibly to one another as their menfolk.

Shakespeare’s Women brings the action into the twenty-first century staged in a Trauma Support group on a council estate in Tower Hamlets in East London dominated by warring drug dealers whose ‘patch’ extends to the physical towerblocks that sit either side of this self-designated ‘safe space’. Like the blending together of fairy tale characters in the Royal Opera House’s Hansel and Gretel, Haynes imagines a world in which all of Shakespeare’s creations – both the women present here and often-referenced men – exist in the same estate at the same time in a way that puts the pieces together very nicely, using Shakespeare’s original plots and creations to merge their stories and make the menfolk part of the same criminal network, thereby forcing their women into the same orbit. Limiting the number of plays referenced is the key to this, and Haynes finds a way to blend Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Twelfth Night and, crucially, The Winter’s Tale to give the action its shape. mining each of these texts for backstory, psychological insight and inspiration for the newly imagined portions of their lives.

Haynes’s play establishes its value by becoming more than the sum of its parts, and what could have been a series of imagined testimonials from survivors in the support group instead is woven into a meaningful story that gives the women continued reason to fear the world outside the walls of the support group and a purpose in coming together. Although Haynes’s action takes place after the business of Shakespeare’s original plot in every case, none of the women are entirely free from the patriarchal influences and coercive male relationships that has so far shaped their lives. Haynes, though, also gives them individual agency, fleshing out lives, careers and certainly attitudes that see the women clash and confront one another, each one affected by their Shakespearean experience but refusing to be defined by the men they knew or still know.

Shakespeare’s plays are largely driven by a male lust for power and control – even the comedies have Kings, soldiers and father’s exerting coercive influence over daughters they want married off to the right man or wanting to take control of a kingdom or two. It is the consequences of this ego that shapes the destiny of the women in the plays as well as the area in which they live, and so Haynes moves the women into a new phase of their life and assumes they survive their original conclusions – Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth are dead, Kate is married to ‘Peter’ and Othello just last night tried to strangle Dessie – yet they still exist in a world controlled by men. It is a well-realised approach even in this staged reading format, and Haynes has successfully brought together these women into one well-structured story with the effective and contemporised renaming of key characters, a modernising of jobs and character relationships and an external setting that is both dangerously clear and a useful driving force for the play.

The frame here is a well rendered updated of A Winter’s Tale, the murderous and domineering Leontes (now called Leon) served time for child trafficking his own daughter to America and for drug running. Not forgiven at the end of the play by his statue-wife, Haynes’s imagines that Hermione goes into witness protection believed dead by the community and a couple of decades later the now teenage daughter Perdita returns to find her mother. Haynes introduces a Romeo and Juliet concept of warring families, only the action is between two rival estates, one of which Leon has returned from prison to resume managing. Throughout Shakespeare’s Women the impending drug feud that is about to erupt between the rival gangs – Leon and The Duke – is enhanced by the fearful speculation about Leon’s return, a tension that Haynes feeds through this three Act play to note the different layers of male control and violence that affect the lives of the women – escape a bad relationship perhaps but Haynes plots out a local power structure that can still cause them a different kind of harm.

Into that frame of semi-powerlessness and dangerous retribution for stepping too far out of line, Haynes then subtly introduces some of the other stories borrowed from Shakespeare which are then enhanced to provide the subplots and side notes that flesh-out the substance of the play. The trigger is Othello’s attack on Desdemona, both of them low-level dealers but Haynes retains the substance of their story involving their mate Iago, fits of jealousy and other acts of domestic violence which Dessie reports to the group. Haynes fits this story into her and our world by recasting Othello as an illegal immigrant and opening the door to his outsider status and a deportation to Rwanda joke. And while Haynes may have been tempted to go further, only one fairly minor character receives a gender-swap with Michael Cassio becoming Cassie, Dessie’s best friend, which Haynes uses to create subgroups and different levels of allegiance within the collection of women who meet regularly but don’t all know each other that well or necessarily respect each other.

The Support Group thus becomes the centre of the action, a single set and a number of meetings across several hours run by former police officer Beth (Lady Macbeth) whose brusque manner leads to a slow reveal across the period of the play. That the Macbeths story took place within a law enforcement body borrows from Jo Nesbo’s novelisation of Shakespeare’s play set in a corrupt police force within a noirish cityscape which Haynes adds to here with the support room thus becoming a place where crime and justice intersect. It is a theme that becomes increasingly important as the action evolves, with both Leon and Beth’s external stories being dragged into this space which eventually becomes the core drama, and Shakespeare’s Women is strong in its ability to weave different strands together to create this bigger picture and the impression of an endless cycle of brutal male interaction on both sides of the law.

But there is little tenderness among the women either each with a different purpose or chip on their shoulder throughout the play which is not necessarily resolved at its conclusion. Some of these ideas are not as fully worked through as the broader scenario including a manufactured collision between Twelfth Night’s Viola and Kate from Taming of the Shrew who retains her sparky characteristics by refusing to forgive or even be remotely courteous to her counterpart. It adds a dynamic to the simmering tension in the room but the backstory that Haynes has worked out for them needs stronger explanation, particularly if the writer is choosing to maintain Kate’s frostiness and refusal to forgive throughout the play. A similar problem affects Cordelia’s (King Lear) substory which also becomes stuck in a single gear, an older women now still guiltily clutching the ashes of her father. It is a single joke carried across too many scenes and while Cordelia gets one opportunity later in the play to confront her own choices, her story also has little dramatic progression nor is the character properly integrated into the wider warring estates framework that could give her some purpose.

These are small issues and easy to fix because the confrontations between Beth and Leon are highly charged and full of unpredictable danger that gives the play it’s central purpose, a false sense of security while they wait for him to arrive and then a physical embodiment of male coercion to act against when he finally appears, all the while noting their fear of the man’s unpredictability and lack of reason. Against this, Haynes makes space for the testimonies of the women – vitally important in a play that seeks to return their voice – and while this isn’t a series of monologues, each character is given enough time to summarise or expand on their experience for the audience. Some of that Haynes has taken directly from Shakespeare, distilling the events of a play we know and putting that into the language, accent and personal style of the women she imagines them to be by this point. For other characters, this is invented and imagined beyond the end of their original tale, filling in the gaps between then and now as Haynes does for Viola now contemplating the implications of gender or others thinking differently about their sexuality which, an approach that brings the lives of these creations into the twenty-first century.

As a rehearsed reading, Shakespeare’s Women is simply staged by director Jude Kelly, a circle of chairs and some props with the actors largely onstage throughout, except when a particularly dramatic exit or entrance is required. The nature of the square space means sightlines are limited and characters tended to sit in the same seats in the support group which made them invisible for almost the entire performance to those on the sides – finding a way to move them around more naturally would arguably have created some variety even in this not quite static reading. The cast was a pleasing mixture of established and well-known actors with new performers in their first post-drama school role creating important training opportunities. Tamsin Grieg as Beth was particularly strong, capturing the tough exterior riven with internal guilt and determination to protect others. Her scenes with Will Keen’s fairly terrifying Leon bristled with tension, while Keen added much to the narrative by providing the stage directions. Other notable cast members included Sam Spiro’s Cordelia, Perdita Weeks as a lairy Desdemona, Leila Farzad as a very much untamed Kate and Libby Mai as Viola, with a different kind of self-questioning spirit.

As Shakespeare’s Women develops it needs to focus primarily on the detail, how to ensure that each character is not only updated from their endpoint in Shakespeare’s tale but becomes fully integrated into the life of the two estates and this single place of solace that the women, whether they admit it or not, individually require. While audience members probably need to know a bit about each of the separate plays to fully understand some of the conversations Haynes includes and how they have been imaginatively pulled together, it needs some trimming and a tighter focus in the second Act, and there could be a lot more to the Hermione and Perdita segments, yet the essential structure and characterisation is already there. What Shakespeare’s Women does is find power in the solidarity and communal experience of women, and whether they fight, judge or ignore each other, Haynes’s characters have finally found something to rely on.

Shakespeare’s Women was performed as a rehearsed reading on 7 January 2023. Follow this site on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

Chasing Hares – Young Vic

Exploitation can take many forms and sometimes it even begins with a creative opportunity. Sonali Bhattacharyya’s lead character in new play Chasing Hares takes a while to find themselves confronting a major moral dilemma but the road to it begins with storytelling, imagination and character creation. Bhattacharyya is interested in where these stories come from, what they represent and their meaning to the individuals and local groups from which they emerge. A play that navigates the hope and aspiration of working class communities in urban India yearning for rural and natural landscapes set against the cold political and economically deprived reality, Chasing Hares experiments with its theatrical form.

Dramas about strikes and factory unrest tend to follow a defined pattern, one in which solidarity and the humanity of the workers is developed before unfolding heroic, David versus Goliath tales of standing up to management in the pursuit of liberty and equality. Stage musical Made in Dagenham and the recent Shake the City appearing in Jermyn Street Theatre’s Footprint’s Festival are jaunty perspectives about female unionisation and pay disputes while a defining work like Lynne Nottage’s Sweat was not so much a play but a howl of pain for one-industry towns in rust belt America decimated by the move to imported cheaper labour.

Chasing Hares sits somewhere between these extremes, using allegory and theatre to create visual spectacle but equally concerned with the plight of factory workers in Kolkata where jobs are scarce and a major international contract creates a mad scramble to make money. And like Nottage, Bhattacharyya focuses on the difficult middle management role when Prab a former worker is raised to a position of power and ultimately compromised by it as he chooses between protecting his own salary for the sake of his young family and, in the face of unscrupulous management that pushes against his moral code, the pressure to care for the people in his charge.

But while politically fired, this is not a story in which right and wrong are presented as black and white concepts, and more than once Bhattacharyya notes the central character’s active consent to the events of the play and, despite his history as a former activist and agitator, we see Prab’s willingness to ‘sell-out’ his ideals for material comforts and, more seriously, to advance his creative ambitions. But there are other compromises too and while the workers of the Khub Bhalo factory are never seen, their financial desperation forces them to take significant risks, putting themselves in danger in ways that inform the ethical quandary at the heart of the show.

But Bhattacharyya’s point is an important one, mirrored in a modern-day conclusion based in the UK, that argues choice in these circumstances is a misleading concept when social constructs of power, money and influence create the conditions in which one group of people can exploit another. What the factory families chose to do may be morally and ethically troubling and the owners may argue that all applications to work are voluntarily given, but ultimately Bhattacharyya shows there is no other option when the alternative is to go without an income, food or housing.

Bhattacharyya dramatises that through the gentle rise and trajectory of Prab’s family, growing from a small set of rooms where they live with his wife’s mother to regular work, a stable job and the chance to live in a better neighbourhood. At the start of the play, Prab is one of many out of worker breadwinners who stalk the factory gates every morning in the hope that it will reopen and work will be plentiful. But Bhattacharyya creates conditions in which contracts are awarded to competitors operating at lower cost and the regular early morning clamber for work is a futile hope in an area in terminal decline. The sudden end to the drought brings with it another set of problems, an employers market in which the factory owners can offer almost any terms and still be inundated with applicants. And slowly Bhattacharyya starts to tip the balance where opportunity becomes no choice at all.

The journey that Prab is taken on is a complicated one as he navigates the shift from worker to manager urged by his wife, Kajol, to remain passive and do whatever is asked him of him to protect their young family. As the rewards for that flood in, improving their financial and, to a degree, their social status, Bhattacharyya’s Prab is troubled by the consequences that give grounding to the play, turning what could be a solely high-minded story about workers’ rights into a more complicated portrait of individual, family and social needs conflicting across the experience of one man.

The extent to which the protagonist is taken in by the factory owner’s son Devesh who is also a theatre performer is shaped by Prab’s personal desire for creative recognition and fulfillment, when an opportunity to write and perform alongside him and fellow actor, Chellam, in a Jatra troupe presents itself after a night at her show. It is an unusual entry point to the play’s central dilemma but it does create depth in the characterisation by giving Prab a separate interior life and aspiration that Bhattacharyya intricately works into his political ideals, creating opportunities to compromise Prab with multiple implications for his professional integrity as well as his morality. But the writer is also arming her character, giving him different ways to reach the same audience of workers by looking to the social power of theatre to reflect and inspire.

This leads into the world of narrative and imagination that anchors the play and Bhattacharyya has Prab create an allegory that runs through the show, an original piece that speaks to the mystical traditions of India storytelling with its fairytale characteristics including an oppressed princess, talking animals and an evil landlord destroying the natural habitat but with fervent political undertones that speak to worker conditions and the possibility of a utopian equality. Bhattacharyya feeds the audience this story in chapters running throughout the show, told first to Prab’s baby as he tries to lull her to sleep and later as acted scenes performed by Prab’s famous new friends as he dramatises his imagined world for them.

What Bhattacharyya is doing here is quite interesting, on the one hand exploring the consistency of these ideal societies, partly referencing communism but also deeper traditions in not just Indian writing but in broader international romantic responses to the growing pressures and confinement of urbanisation. This fantasy world that Prab creates is entirely rural and equitable – there would have to be a lot of meetings as one character jokes but there is a wistfulness in the creation of these places that is both aspirational and, the storyteller knows, almost certainly unachievable. For Prab and Chellam the question becomes to what degree are they motivated to do something, to make a small difference while all the time knowing what they truly want is nothing but fantasy.

In order to tell his tale, Prab allows himself to be bought, initially for financial security but also for art, to be able to work with creative people. His head is turned by their flattery and interest in his ideas, giving him a platform that it takes him some time to recognise and use, eventually prompted by events elsewhere in the play. But there are other costs too, not just to his integrity but there is a price to speaking out both in muted and amplified forms which are explored in the final section of the play as the consequences of the two sides of his life come together, that in themselves create a whole new direction for his family. Within Chasing Hares then, Bhattacharyya asks what power does a story have and what should be the cost?

In staging the play, designer Moi Tran has appropriately created two playing spaces, parallel stages, one of which sits in recess. And across them the two worlds of Chasing Hares intersect – Prab’s reality and the illusory dramas performed by the actors allowing director Milli Bhatia to move between these stories, retaining their distinction but blending them and their outcomes together. Akhila Krishnan’s striking video design projects across the stage, creating spectacle by filling it with an animated version of the forest landscape that Prab develops in his mind, unfolding its trees, creatures and tonal shifts as he recounts his dark but hopeful story.

Across the piece, Krishnan’s work begins to creep into the sparse simplicity of the everyday that Tran implies with only a few props to represent the changing spaces from family homes to the factory floor and its backrooms. The appearance of silhouetted birds edging into the corners of this story is pointed, taking on a foreboding quality that adds to the atmosphere. Jai Morjaria’s lighting and Tran’s costume contrast these subtle moments with an explosion of theatricality when the actors perform with interesting reflections on the visual effects of messaging and, as our very best political theatre shows, commentary and entertainment need not be mutually exclusive.

Irfan Shamji as Prab settles into his role quickly, a likable lead that the audience can invest in and follow through the stories as a representation of thousands of similar lives. Shamji moves well between the straightforward scenes in which Prab comes to understand his own limits and the jackanory moments in which he conjures a whole world for baby Amba, although really for the audience. A good man in an impossible situation, the character grows in confidence as Chasing Hares unfolds and Shamji captures well the energy and enthusiasm for Prab’s creative endeavors, his increasingly troubled conscience and the pressure to hold onto any job for the sake of his family.

Zainab Hasan as his pragmatic wife Kajol offers a contrast, a woman who knows the price of things and wants to make less high-minded choices but nonetheless complements Prab as a partner. It would be useful to see more of her perspective, particularly as she too works multiple jobs and is the primary carer for Amba but Hasan makes much from the material she has. Scott Karim brings nuance to the show’s main baddie Devesh who could easily have become a bland boo-hiss villain. Instead, there is personality in his lack of empathy and ability to manipulate that make Karim a strong and compelling presence on stage. As is Ayseha Darker’s Chellam, a starlet tired of the classic works she must endlessly perform and eager to tackle something more meaningful. But Chellam is also a character with some depth and a similar pragmatism that makes her almost cynically dismissive of her work until inspired by Prab’s writing. Darker also has great comic timing and a cutting delivery that brings some alternative moments of levity to the piece.

Chasing Hares is a short play, running at just over two hours with an interval and there is much in this world particularly among the secondary characters and their motivations that could be expanded. Not seeing the factory workers isn’t a problem given the play’s setting in middle management and domestic spaces but towards the end a sense of the widespread fervour for change and the impact of Prab’s actions on the community needs a little more might behind it. Nonetheless, Bhattacharyya’s play is packed with commentary about the power structures that support political and economic elites, the limits to freedom of choice and the optimistic possibilities of one great story as the means to tear it all down.

Chasing Hares is at the Young Vic until 13 August with tickets from £12.50. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.

John – National Theatre

2017 was a great year for new writing and in the next few months, judging panels will have the unenviable task of trying to decide whether Oslo, Ink or The Ferryman deserves the accolade of best new play, knowing that whoever they chose, will rob the other two. But now three weeks into January, the first new play of 2018 is opening at the National Theatre. Following the success of The Flick which had it’s UK premiere in the Dorfman in 2016, Annie Baker’s latest play, intriguingly called John and first performed in New York in 2015, makes its London debut in the same space. Baker’s work is a subtle examination of modern ideas of self-worth, often bringing characters together at times of transition, trapping them in a contained, often claustrophobic space, as they try to determine a way forward.

Troubled young couple, Jenny and Elias, arrive at a local bed and breakfast for a few days as they pause their trip to visit some local Civil War sites. It’s the week after Thanksgiving and along with the decorations, the strange little house, run by host Mertis, is filled with dolls and ephemera that clutter every available surface. During their stay the couple get to know more about the attentive owner, and, as their own relationship begins to strain, confide in her hoping to discover what their future should hold.

No one should go to a Baker play expecting plots stuffed with drama and activity, instead she writes slow-burn stories that centre almost entirely on character and theme. The National Theatre’s production may have so far managed to shave 10 minutes off the run-time but John is a monster show of 3 hours and 20 minutes with two intervals. Yet, there is considerable engagement with the world Baker creates, and you feel yourself pulled into their discussions about love and purpose. Baker has a particular ear for realistic dialogue and while she out Pinters Pinter with elaborately long pauses and deliberate stillness, her writing genuinely reflects the small moments of awkwardness or tension between sentences that accurately reflect the circularity and stilted nature of real conversation.

Despite its title, this is a play about women and for much of the time it is the female characters whose perspectives we hear and sympathise with. But they are complicated and, as we discover in the plot, not always entirely moral people whose bad behaviour is called into question. Purposefully the three women are nothing alike, representing very different kinds of living as small-town collides with the big city, work and home, glamour and comfort crash into one another while still finding a semblance of emotional common ground between them.

And it is the power of three that seems to fill Baker’s work, as many of John’s scenes are an ongoing dialogue between three people, often those with a close relationship and an alien third. Initially it is the central characters, Jenny, Elias and Mertis, but increasingly as the central couple’s stability begins to fracture we see other trios deliberately and, sometimes unexpectedly united – one of Baker’s skills is to suggest that there are always three people even when you only see two.

For instance, early on, the audience discovers why Jenny and Elias’s relationship is so precarious and all of their conversations, including muffled offstage arguments, have the presence of a third party hanging between them. Even in the occasional spots of happiness, the reality of their predicament intrudes upon them, borne out by other aspects of Baker’s writing, not only the mysterious absence of Mertis’s husband who she claims is in the house yet unwell, but also the continual references to the universe, to spirituality, ghosts and God. Never fully elucidated or woven successfully into the text, these themes nonetheless reiterate the idea of the constant third in any scenario, someone who silently watches.

The idea of being observed is raised several times, and in a particularly neat duologue between Mertis and Elias both recall feeling observed as a child, concluding that this presence was guiding and protecting them. Jenny feels differently, and in a separate conversation triggered by seeing the same toy in Mertis’s house, has a more unnerving and judgemental interaction with a doll she claimed used to make bad things happen to her which she would have to make amends for. Baker uses this to reinforce her idea about individual conscience and self-worth, showing that Jenny in particular requires external validation for her actions even if those are projected into a lifeless figurine.

For the second time in as many weeks the private home turned into a hotel becomes an important setting, used to create a tone of uncertainty and underscore the tension to be drawn from the arrival of strangers into someone’s else’s environment. From Pinter’s seaside boarding house in last week’s The Birthday Party designed by the Quay Brothers, to this sinister establishment in Gettysburg America, the displacement of characters is reinforced by inserting them into a world far from their own. For all its domestic warmth and cosy appeal, Chloe Lamford’s detailed set suggests at best a quirky owner, and a worst something considerably more sinister beneath the chintz and endlessly staring figures that make Brooklynites Jenny and Elias seem out of place.

Lamford has created a strange little world of domestic harmony crossed with eccentricity, which fills the centre of the room with sofas and a bizarre self-playing piano, while at one end is an enormous window that looks out onto the beautifully coloured sunsets, lit by Peter Mumford, that offer freedom and a slightly obsessive idea of the natural beauty of the universe which is a frequent refrain in the text. At the opposite end of the room is “Paris”, Mertis’s arrangement of bistro tables for her guests to use.

Director James Macdonald allows all of these elements to coexist in a jumbled harmony that reflects the cluttered set and emotions of the characters. Nothing is rushed which, to the despair of some audience members, means things move very slowly across the evening, giving the protagonists time to think, to sit and to reflect which is so true to life but so rarely permitted on stage for fear of losing the audience’s attention. It’s such a shame, however, that too many long conversations happen at the far sides of the stage meaning a good proportion of the Dorfman audience cannot see anything.

Having a proscenium arch show always feels like such a waste in this most flexible of theatres, and while necessary for this one, poor blocking often puts all the characters out of sight of anyone seated at the sides. You are warned about restricted views of course, but the scenes could be positioned a little better and given that a lot of people moved seats in the interval, there are clear benefits in rethinking a couple of those extreme side locations before press night (although of course critics will be seated where they can see best).

Mertis the B&B owner is a fascinating creation, at once cosy and welcoming, thoughtful and kind to her clearly cold and fractious guest, but with an underlying sinister tone that would allow the character to be interpreted in several different ways and leaves plenty of unanswered questions about who she is. Marylouise Burke decides to make her a semi-sweet all-American mother-figure, fussing about the home and plying her guests with biscuits.

Yet she is a mass of contradictions, refusing to turn on the heating at night despite a shivering Jenny having to sleep in the living room. Mertis also makes dismissive references to some of her rooms having a mind of their own, and Burke continually makes it seem that Mertis is hiding facts if not outright lying to cover up something unsavoury. Even the strange absence of her second husband is dismissed so suspiciously by Burke that the audience begins to wonder if there is something much stranger happening in this house, but the joy of Burke’s sweetness and light approach is that the audience is never quite sure if something much more terrifying is about to occur.

Anneika Rose plays Jenny as a modern woman keen to make amends but unwilling to continually prostrate herself for past indiscretions. Its clear she has made the trip to Gettysburg to placate Elias but uses the time to try to discover her future. Rose makes Jenny smart and friendly, fascinated by ideas about the enormity of the world that come through conversations with Mertis and her friend Genevieve. We see her become increasingly dissatisfied with Elias, and, despite her conscious attempts to be close to him, she actively seeks time away from him, their room and their joint activities, a separation that Rose charts convincingly.

Elias is a more neurotic character than his girlfriend, and Tom Mothersdale allows much of that to stem from an idea of moral superiority, of being the wronged man. Fascinated by the Civil War, and carrying the burden of an unconventional hippy Jewish childhood, it isn’t until much later in the play that Elias is given the chance to reveal his own inner turmoil, and Mothersdale takes the opportunity to balance the scales with an important and well delivered discussion with his hostess about whether to persist with or end his relationship, tempering his unyielding exterior with moments of doubt and sympathy.

John has its faults and some of the themes aren’t as clearly elucidated as they need to be to draw all of the strands together satisfactorily, but Baker’s plays are so rich with detail and full of insight into the way people really behave that they draw you into their world for the duration. With plenty of new plays yet to come in 2018, Baker has set the tone with an intriguing examination of the fear of being watched and judged that prevents people from living the life they should.

John is at the National Theatre until 3 March and tickets start at £15. The National Theatre also offers £20 tickets for the week ahead in its Friday Rush scheme.