Max and Lola reckon they deserve a nice retirement. Both survived the Holocaust – Max hid in woodlands and Lola was in Bergen-Belsen. They’ve made good in New York, even if Max wonders whether selling sportswear in Flatbush constitutes a meaningful life.
Now the couple have bought a condo in sunny Florida. But the apartment they purchased is late on construction, forcing them to spend their first night in the apartment block’s showroom. Worse, their troubled daughter Debby has followed them from Brooklyn. Can Max and Lola run away from the dependent adult that their own trauma has irreparably wrecked?
Donald Margulies is best known for Dinner With Friends, his Pulitzer prize-winning play about a couple who re-evaluate their marriage in the wake of their friends’ divorce. The Model Apartment, written and set in the 1980s, shares that preoccupation with cracks in the middle-class dream, although it is a more shallow work. The staccato structure, a series of short scenes, is unnecessary when the drama takes place over a single night in a single room. With more developed exchanges, we could dive deeper under the surface.
What lifts Laurence Boswell’s production is the strength of the performances. Diana Quick is magnetic as Lola, spinning romanticised yarns about concentration camps. (Was she really the closest inmate friend of Anne Frank, we wonder?) Her physical chemistry with Ian Gelder is profoundly touching: here are years of physical tenderness. Gelder’s Max is obsessed with the baby girl who died while he was fleeing persecution; as a result, his living daughter is sexually obsessed with Nazis, eating compulsively to compensate for her parents’ memories of starvation. Debby – played by Emily Bruni in a fat suit – strikes farcical poses, but there’s nothing funny about her hopelessness. As Neil, the teenage lover she has picked up off the street, Enyi Okoronkwo is compelling but underused.
Designer Tim Shortall’s recreation of a Trumpish condo on the cheap is impeccable, even if this fake apartment, with its empty casings of appliances and bowls glued to their tables, is a clunky metaphor for hollow American dreams. Fortunately, the performances give the production more substance.
At Ustinov, Bath until 22 December.
