What we know is that this is a house by the sea. A family of women amble through it, making coffee, toast or a meal, talking in intimate snatches. Sometimes they play charades or Jenga, other times they quibble, reminisce or share their innermost thoughts. These are things we know and can hold on to in this slippery and quizzical rough jewel of a play.
If Cordelia Lynn’s last work, Love and Other Acts of Violence, felt deliberately jagged and elliptical, there is an even more audacious – and reckless? – sense here of a play that seeks to rewrite the rules of playwriting.
The story begins with a drowning and the arrival of Mark (Tom Mothersdale), a stranger in an all-female household, led by Shirley (Geraldine Alexander), an academic, and Sarah (Thusitha Jayasundera), her partner and painter. There are two daughters, the unhappily pregnant George (Pearl Chanda) and the kooky Toni (Grace Saif). Mark is looking for the third, his beloved, who has disappeared.
Directed by James Macdonald, the action – what there is – takes place around domestic settings on Zoë Hurwitz’s airy stage design (dining table, kitchen and patios). The drama is mostly static, comprising chats around the table, or snatches of conversation as characters cook or come and go. Outside the sea roars thunderously, inside the lights dilate and one enigmatic scene after another never quite takes shape.
A study of family grief and love, this is strange, elemental but ultimately amorphous drama. It has some piercing scenes but they are unhinged from a whole, and they hold us at a remove rather than sweeping us in. It is as if Lynn sets up mysteries that she is intent on not solving.
Sometimes it looks rather like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse come to life. Other times it has all the delicate middle-class domestic detail of a Tessa Hadley novel but with a darker underbelly as violent fantasy invades the play’s prevailing naturalism – so much so that you can feel the ground shake when it thunders, and imagine the lightning blazing on a blank wall (beautiful light and sound designs by Jack Knowles and Max Pappenheim respectively).
Either way, it is eminently literary, and would read beautifully on the page. Language is used in lyrical ways and there are flaring moments when characters describe a memory or vision, and when an old, mythic figure (June Watson) emerges out of nowhere to talk about her losses.
It is all startling, frustrating, self-consciously elusive, its meaning glittering distantly in the horizon but just out of reach, tauntingly so. It is, simultaneously, a “must-see” and “what was that?”
At Hampstead Theatre Downstairs until 29 April
