Department stores are the most banal places. We hardly give a thought to them as we hurry to buy our lipstick from ground floor cosmetics or a kettle from kitchenware in the basement. We think nothing of those who serve us, of their secret lives and innermost desires, as we hurry to get the shopping done.
But the department store is an institution, a microcosm of the wider world, a place with its own rituals and rules. Family-run stores such as Clements are increasingly a thing of the past, but for many of the people who have worked there over the years, there is indeed a sense of family.
In Wilson & Wilson's promenade performance, which takes place nightly in Clements after shopping hours, the secret world is vividly brought to life. You are taken on a journey through the closed store, passing through bedroom furniture and fine china, accounts and haberdashery. In kitchenware, it is as if the kettles and toaster are whispering to you. In the boardroom, a welcome home party is being given for a returning second world war hero. Half-eaten fairy cakes and sandwiches sit forlornly on the plates, the gramophone plays, the bunting wilts, and smoke from a half-smoked cigarette curls wistfully in an ashtray.
This is theatre full of surprises. You constantly feel that you have entered a room where somebody has just left. The shopfloor is alive with ghosts: Doris from Ladies Wear (1960-1978) who wants to undo the wrong she did to Fiona Markson; Martha from dress fabrics apologising to Evelyn; Harold from stationery, killed on his first day in the war. These snatches of humanity and regret are entwined with a wider story of love and revenge, the tale of hunchbacked Sidney Glock, relegated to boiler duties in the basement and his love for shopgirl Iris, who only has eyes for the store's golden boy. It is an everyday story of shop folk, given a Shakespearean resonance (think Richard III and Othello) in Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan's script, which gives voice to the best and worst in all of us.
Cleverly using just two live performers (Deka Walmsley and Debra Penny, both great) but creating the impression of an enclosed institution teeming with life, this collaboration between the Palace Theatre Watford and Wilson & Wilson is superb retail therapy for the imagination.
· Until May 31. Box office: 01923 235455.
