ajhlovestheatre

DON’T DESTROY ME

by Michael Hastings

Directed by Tricia Thorns

Arcola Theatre, London – until 3 February 2024

https://www.arcolatheatre.com/whats-on/dont-destroy-me/

Reviving plays that have been untouched for decades can be a risky business: for every unearthed gem there’s a snooze fest that makes it all too clear why no director has been near it since before the Luftwaffe closed our theatres. Tricia Thorns’ Two’s Company has a better than average track record when it comes to rediscovering dormant dramas however, and Michael Hastings’s Don’t Destroy Me (written, astonishingly, when he was just seventeen) is an enjoyable, intermittently fascinating piece.

Set in a 1956 boarding house where 15 year old Sammy (a convincingly tormented Eddie Boyce) has come to reunite with Leo, his Hungarian Jewish father who sent him away to England as an infant to be brought up by relatives and escape the Nazis. Leo (Paul Rider in a painfully honest performance) has a miserable existence dominated by alcohol abuse and a much younger wife who can barely tolerate him. The Brixton lodging is a predominantly Jewish household, and although the Holocaust is never mentioned, the sense of unspoken trauma and restlessness is palpable in the writing and in Thorns’ frequently riveting production.

Don’t Destroy Me is no masterpiece -for all its truth and vividness, it strangely lacks a focussed centre- but it is remarkable for a first play, and demonstrates a notable ability in a youthful Hastings to swirl together a world of dramatic and literary influences into a tangy, elliptical but mostly satisfying whole. Contemporary to, and reminiscent of, the kitchen sink plays of Wesker and Osborne that revolutionised English drama at the Royal Court in the 1950s, the writing also has a fanciful, poetic quality that suggests a working class London Tennessee Williams.

The ghost of Williams hangs especially heavy over two characters. That’s needy, unstable Mrs Pond, whose lightning fast changes in mood, shady sexual past and eccentric tea-leaf reading present, bespeak of deep emotional trauma or at the very least severe mental health issues, and her smart, highly strung daughter Suki, employing an imaginative fantasy life as respite from her mothers mania and neglect. Nell Williams invests the latter with a compelling mixture of vulnerability and imperiousness.

With her faux genteel accent, dancers physicality and sense of aching, otherworldly sadness, Alix Dunmore’s elegant broken-doll Mrs Pond feels like an English cousin to Blanche du Bois; it’s a haunting, supremely effective portrayal. Nathalie Barclay skilfully navigates a perfectly calibrated line between steel and kindness as Sammy’s youthful stepmother, and Timothy O’Hara brings warmth and menace to the neighbour she habitually breaks her marriage vows with. Rider is wonderful, finding a tragic dignity in the dissolute ruins of Leo’s shattered life, and Nicholas Day does detailed, beautiful work as the kind rabbi invited to what turns into the tea party from hell.

Sue Kelvin is a glorious, gorgeous force of nature as landlady Mrs Miller, the main source of light relief, whose compassion is tempered with shards of self righteousness and a penchant for gossip and judgement. Eddie Boyce and Nell Williams suggest with laudable intensity the power-shifts between the mutually attracted younger pair, each questing to escape their separate painful, traumatised existences.

Alex Marker provides a nice, semi-realistic looking split level set that tantalisingly allows for eavesdropping with its see-through door and partially non-existent walls. The excellence of the acting goes a long way towards diverting attention from the weaknesses of the play. Not much happens and the penchant of some of the characters to communicate in a series of non sequiturs could become tiresome, pretentious even, but somehow never quite does, mainly due to the intelligence and craft of the cast.

If Don’t Destroy Me had been the work of an older writer it could be seen as derivative, and it is pretty overwrought at times, but it shows formidable promise and, particularly in the depiction of tortured Mrs Pond, foreshadows Hasting’s later, more accomplished work in his most famous play Tom And Viv. This well judged production may not necessarily spark a series of revivals of this interesting but naive, imperfect piece but it’s an engrossing couple of hours in the theatre.