This is the second play by Eugene O’Hare staged at this address in four months and it confirms my feeling that he is a writer struggling to discover his own distinctive voice. Like The Weatherman, which showed two misfits caught up in a murky sex-trade, this one has strong echoes of Pinter, but again O’Hare proves that he writes good roles for actors.
The setting is a house in London’s East End where a mother and her middle-aged son live together in mutual antagonism. To make matters worse Nell, who uses a wheelchair, depends on Sydney for her food, drink and visits to the bathroom. What sustains Sydney, who exists in a state of raging paranoia about ambulance sirens and the alien voices he hears on the streets, is the hope of inheriting the family home. When it looks, however, as if Nell intends to pass on the property to her Irish carer, the domestic warfare is raised to a new level.
There are echoes of Steptoe and Son in the portrait of a familial pair bound together by fractious necessity, and of The Caretaker in the idea of their suspicion of the intrusive outsider. But, for all the play’s derivativeness, O’Hare writes lively dialogue – “Another birthday, another filthy year nearer now. Yip diddle de dee,” cries the rancorous Nell – that actors can wrap their tongues round. Phillip Breen, as director, deftly heightens the dark comedy beneath the surface bile and has assembled a first-rate cast.
Miriam Margolyes, lately more familiar for being her uninhibited self on television, reminds us what an excellent actor she is. She brings out all of Nell’s grumpy malevolence while suggesting she is haunted by guilt over the institutionalising of another son and even has a grudging regard for his despised sibling. Mark Hadfield, an expert in playing loners, also captures perfectly Sydney’s splenetic isolation and craving for affection and Vivien Parry invests the Celtic carer with a suitable ambivalence. O’Hare can obviously write. I would simply urge him to banish the memories of all the plays he has seen or appeared in.
Sydney and the Old Girl is at Park theatre, London, until 30 November.
