Writer: Maria Speight
Director: Adam Gower
Despite some strong acting, Maybe You Should Know, about an older female musician and her young male lodger, doesn’t quite hit the right notes. A little too unhurried for its own good, the play lacks the momentum of the metronome that figures so importantly in the latter half of the show.
Of course, the most famous play about a landlady and her lodger is Entertaining Mr Sloane, soon to be revived at the Young Vic this autumn. In Orton’s shocking comedy, Kath sees Sloane as her lover and her son. In Maria Speight’s play, Julie sees her lodger, the American-Ukrainian Daniel, studying economics at a London university, as a stand-in for her grown-up son who now lives in Austria.
The play begins as Julie calls down Daniel for breakfast, the table laid with eggs, toast and coffee. But Daniel doesn’t eat breakfast, and neither does he drink coffee so early in the morning. He’s told her this before, but even though he’s stayed in her house for what must be a few months now, Julie perseveres with her motherly duties.
The comedy is gentle in the first scene, but having the older generation mixing up the names of social media platforms or not knowing their Gagas from their Tupacs is a bit of a cliché now. When Julie refers to Instagram as “The Instagram”, the laughs come, but is the older generation really so out of touch? At one point in the 55-minute piece, it seems as if the play will be a swap of musical genres; her classical for his rap. But fortunately, this scenario never develops further after Julie tells Daniel to switch off his music.
The real thrust of the play is concerned with Julie’s errant son, now the lead oboist in a smart orchestra, coming to London to play at the Royal Albert Hall (or as Daniel calls it, the Prince Albert Hall). Why won’t he visit his mother or ask her to the concert? What secrets lie in the broken relationship between him and his mother?
Daniel has no such issues with his own mother, who moved to America from Ukraine. Daniel’s dual nationality – he’s staying at Julie’s as part of the UK Government’s Homes for Ukraine initiative – brings little to the drama. He could be a student from anywhere, even England.
Nadia Bond is good as Julie, the once-promising pianist, although less ditziness from the script would help her feel more real, while Aidan Parsons brings some pathos to his role as the eager Daniel, who realises that the arts may have been a better subject to study. Cleverly, the play leaves us with questions rather than answers, but some more fine-tuning is needed for this delicate duet.
Runs until 24 August 2025
Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025
