Bush theatre, London
After giving us one of those rare plays about a happy family, The Kitchen Sink, the Bush now returns to the more traditional dysfunctional kind. We even get, in this new play by Irish playwright Nancy Harris, that modish motif of modern drama, a disturbed child. But if the ingredients look familiar, Harris gives them a new spin in an unsettling, engrossing psychological drama.
Things bode ill from the moment Annie, an Irish nanny, turns up unexpectedly in the smart London home of the heavily pregnant Hazel. It turns out Annie has been covertly hired by Hazel's absent husband, Richard, to help out his hard-pressed wife. Given that Hazel, a former high-flying lawyer, is trying to cope with a troubled eight-year-old son and a house filled with olive oil impetuously ordered during a Sicilian holiday, the husband's action doesn't seem unreasonable. But when Richard, a plastic surgeon who has been on a charitable mission to Haiti, finally turns up, his presence only fuels the tensions already simmering in this deeply unhappy household.
What Harris writes about vividly are the problems of parenting. Hazel is a rich, multi-layered creation who sees motherhood as a strange forest she can't get out of, and whose idea of indulgence is to buy a pet tarantula for her son. But her boy, Daniel, also has a demonic side, while the young nanny arrives from Sligo toting all the baggage of a traumatic childhood as well as a jealous envy of the affluent English middle classes. Having created three such credible characters and raised so many fascinating questions about the fallibility of the maternal instinct, Harris's touch only deserts her with the figure of the husband. I can accept that his charitable work demonstrates what Conrad called "the latent egoism of tenderness to suffering" but not that, domestically, he would be quite such an emotionally obtuse berk.
Charlotte Gwinner's production, however, keeps you on tenterhooks, and is acted with great finesse. The witchy, high-cheekboned beauty that made Kate Fleetwood an unforgettable Lady Macbeth serves her equally well as the tensely intelligent Hazel, whom you believe in from start to finish. Denise Gough as the Sligo nanny also perfectly combines an air of professional competence with a sense of bottled resentment, and Mark Bazeley invests Richard with a patina of charm that disguises his patronage. As one of the two boys sharing the role of the son, Jonathan Teale is almost unnervingly good. Not for the first time, however, I wonder how child actors learn to cope with exposure to a world of such fierce adult passion; maybe they just mature more quickly.