This 2006 play by David Lindsay-Abaire predates his Good People, which stunned London audiences with its portrayal of a dysfunctional working-class mum, played by Imelda Staunton. While this earlier piece, filmed in 2011 with Nicole Kidman, has some perceptive things to say about coping with grief, it errs on the side of caution and offers variations of mood rather than of theme.
Becca and Howie are a well-heeled couple struggling to come to terms with the accidental death, eight months earlier, of their son Danny. They themselves are at odds in dealing with their loss: Becca wants to dispose of Danny’s possessions, while Howie sits watching home movies of their lost boy. Everything conspires to remind the couple of their situation, from the pregnancy of Becca’s sister to the way their mum rattles on about the tragedies of the Kennedy clan.
Lindsay-Abaire’s perfectly truthful point is that, however much you try to let go of grief, “you carry it around”. But I couldn’t help thinking of Ibsen, who, in The Master Builder and Little Eyolf, shows that parental trauma constantly comes into collision with the wider world. Here, although the play has its lighter moments and even introduces the notion of parallel universes, it never escapes from its overriding subject.
Edward Hall’s production handles the material with finesse and hints at the class distinctions between the characters. Claire Skinner, very good at suggesting the minutiae of pain as Becca, and Tom Goodman-Hill, as her risk-management husband, clearly inhabit the rarified world of graduate-filled suburbia, while Georgina Rich as Becca’s bruisingly candid sister and Penny Downie as the tactless, gossipy mum are palpably not on the same circuit.
One of the play’s best touches is to show that Becca relates more easily to a highly literate local teenager, nicely played by Sean Delaney, who was the inadvertent cause of her son’s death. But although Lindsay-Abaire claims this is not a tidy play, in the end it lacks the jagged edges of unassuageable loss.
- At Hampstead theatre, London, until 5 March. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
