Writer: Michael Hastings
Director: Tricia Thorns
Director Tricia Thorns and producer Graham Cowley are the duo behind Offie-Award-winning Two’s Company which now presents a ‘rediscovered jewel’ at the Arcola. Don’t Destroy Me, the 1956 debut play of Michael Hastings, centres on a handful of Jewish refugees in post-war Brixton.
Don’t Destroy Me was first staged in 1956, only months after John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. But whereas Osborne, the first angry young man, was 26, Hastings was a mere 18. And the age difference shows.
The first third of Don’t Destroy Me is promising. Under Thorns’ energetic direction, the strange dark comedy of a collection of misfits in a tenement building sparkles with a pleasingly sour energy. Leo Kirtz (Paul Rider) is a broken-down patriarch, a widower whose wife died giving birth to their son, Sammy. His remarriage to Shani and their escape from Hungary has brought no consolation. Shani (a lively Natalie Barclay), is a firecracker who alternately wheedles and excoriates the husband she sneeringly refers to as ‘a little man’, while blatantly conducting a loveless affair with wide-boy bookie, George (Timothy O’Hara).
When the play opens. Sammy, who has been brought up in Croydon by his observant Jewish aunt, is now coming to live with Leo and Shani so he can start work in London. Newcomer Eddie Boyce gives Sammy a heart-breaking innocence as he tries to connect with the father from whom he has been effectively estranged. It’s a good set-up. But Hastings then introduces another pair of surreally strange characters – a mother, Mrs Pond, her mind evidently disturbed by the wartime death of her husband. Drifting around in elegant clothes, posturing to the invisible characters in her head, she is a sort of Blanche Dubois trying to convince others of her gentile fantasy world. Suki, her 17-year-old daughter, seems similarly trapped in a fantasy world.
Thorns works hard to foreground the element of Jewish trauma, giving Suki the line ‘All children whose parents have been busted by war are never the same. We’re a special breed’. But while Don’t Destroy Me certainly illustrates this, Hastings never fully develops its implications. The characters lack psychological coherence and the play becomes a series of overlong scenes nearly all of which end with them hurling vicious abuse at one another. There is, certainly, a dark humour in many places, but the overall tone of the piece is too uneven to make it clear what the author really wants to focus on.
Most disappointing is Hastings’ thin treatment of Judaism. It seems to play almost no part in the lives of the tenants – it’s hard to believe George would place a mezuzah outside his front door. It’s only when Sammy arrives and asks if he can meet the local rabbi that anything about Jewish beliefs and observances (let alone the horrors of Jews under the Nazis) comes to the fore. There is a jolly scene when everyone, barring Leo, gets together to put on a slap-up tea for the rabbi. They, and perhaps we, hope he’ll appear like Godot to set everything in order. But he’s a gentle, unimposing man (Nicholas Day captures his increasing bafflement at the sheer weirdness of everyone), unable to help.
Hastings’ youthfulness is evident in the way he hurls everything into the play – his own experience of a Brixton tenement and his love of jazz are one thing, but Sammy’s switch to uncontrollable fury at his father and then the kindly rabbi, his stepmother Shani and George leaves the character nowhere to go. Even the innocent Suki is made to play Ophelia to his incoherent Hamlet.
It’s all too long (the promised 2-hour performance time becomes 2.5 hours on press night) and repetitively wordy, a world apart from the rapier-like monologues of Osborne’s Jim Porter.
Possibly the most winning performance is by Sue Kelvin as the landlady, Mrs Miller. With her mop and bucket and fund of witticisms, she is the only performer who seems genuinely to have stepped out of the 1950s.
Runs until 3 February 2024
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