It is hard to categorise this unorthodox and intriguing first play. It takes place in a West Midlands home within whose walls a family squabbles and bonds and, it is hinted, the absent or dead still roam. It could be a variation on domestic realism – kitchen-sink gothic, perhaps – or a new genre altogether.
The entire drama takes place in a kitchen behind a gauze fourth wall (an inspired set design by Jasmine Swan). It feels voyeuristic, as if we are twitching a giant net curtain at our neighbours, but there is also more than a hint of a Rear Window-ish thriller, too.
Directed by George Turvey with a creepy sound design by Asaf Zohar, it begins as Matt (Sam Baker-Jones) drops in on his family after years of absence. It is clear he is a drifter – he may even be homeless – but details seem deliberately withheld. The walls of this house retain the past, says one character, and Matt is intent on capturing the sounds of such ghosts … including his dead grandfather.
Playwright Clive Judd sets a meandering pace, slicing the dialogue with silences, switching the focus just when we think we know where it is going. It becomes less an exploration of the past than of how the past affects this family, here and now. There is Matt’s cousin, Jess (Hannah Millward), caught in a downward spiral; his domineering aunt Monica (Lucy Benjamin, of EastEnders fame) and mild-mannered gambling addict Jeff (Mark Frost).
Everyone is trapped, to some degree, which could have been depressing. But there is something utterly invigorating about Judd’s writing: it is funny, delicate, assured, pleasurably circuitous. Not all of it works – we wait on tenterhooks for a bigger story than the play gives us and the end takes an abrupt step into the otherworldly. It also feels directionless, dragging occasionally over two and a half hours, with a few off notes. But it is a first play – this year’s winner of the Papatango prize – and Judd proves a truly exciting discovery with what feels like a quietly radical new form of genre-defying theatre.
Every performance is strong, not least Baker-Jones’s stage debut. And although Here does not ultimately answer the questions it raises, we are held captured.
• At Southwark Playhouse, London, until 3 December.
