The House They Grew Up In, Minerva Theatre, Chichester, review: Samantha Spiro shows star quality
They say that in London you never know your neighbours. And in The House They Grew Up In, Deborah Bruce’s powerful but uneven new play (directed by Jeremy Herrin for Headlong), we see the aspic-preserved lives of Daniel and Peppy Angelis, a brother and sister who have somehow been cut off from the modern world and become a mysterious irritant to those who have gentrified a close-knit Edwardian corner of south-east London.
Slowly, skilfully, Bruce shows us the effects of the siblings’ stasis. Peppy calls for a cat called Charlie Brown who is either imaginary or long dead. Uncle Manny, who is meant to be visiting for Christmas, preoccupies much of their conversation – and then, much like Godot, he never arrives. Daniel, who seems to have an unspecified form of autism, can recite whole passages from Gombrich. He is fussed over by Peppy, who sometimes hears voices in her head, like a manic Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.
All the while, the psychological effects manifest themselves physically in the piles of detritus that litter their house (nimbly arranged in Max Jones’s nifty set design); reusable laundry bags containing long-forgotten ephemera; piles of jaundiced newspapers, books on Veronese and Tintoretto which hint at the promise Peppy showed as an art history undergraduate at Cambridge – before the breakdown.
The play works best in the first half in which the Angelises’ odd existence is interrupted by eight-year-old Ben who, unlike the neighbouring adults, views the pair, particularly Daniel, with an open heart and a lack of judgement. Daniel’s tentative attempt at friendship is horribly botched when Ben spends the night (quite innocently) at the Angelis house and the gentle giant is subsequently arrested on suspicion of kidnap and sexual abuse.
Occasional longueurs are saved by two terrific performances from Samantha Spiro and Daniel Ryan as the siblings. The busky Ryan sits motionless in his favourite armchair like an inactive volcano, while Spiro (recently seen playing Barbara Windsor in the BBC’s biopic) is all desperate grins and careful intellectual articulation (which is at odds with the chaos of her surroundings). Spiro is that rare thing, a lead character actress, and while the performance has a degree of mannerism it is also full-blooded and at times, heartbreaking. Where, you wonder, time and again, did Peppy get lost?
Things start to unravel in the second half as the play makes too many leaps of dramatic faith and credibility starts to be stretched. One particularly misjudged scene shows Peppy’s home invaded by a vulture-like neighbour hoping she will sell it at a bargain price. Ben’s mother Sophie, meanwhile, a brittle yummy mummy who struts around her Magnet kitchen in a simultaneously over-protective and emotionally absent manner, seems never to have got past the development stage.
These flaws are a shame because The House They Grew Up In often has an extraordinary emotional impact, particularly in its sympathy for those who are unable to cope with the real world and so must adopt their own form of reality. Their tragedy, Bruce argues forcefully, is aggravated by our refusal to understand them.
Until August 5. Tickets; 01243 781312; cft.org.uk
