Writer: Anders Lustgarten
Director: Dritero Kasapi
Plays about the conflict that arises when a long departed son or sibling returns home, often for a parent’s funeral, are commonplace, but they seldom pack the punch of Anders Lustgarten’s new work, touring the UK before Riksteatern mounts an Autumn tour of a Swedish translation.
Ben is a successful lawyer in London specialising in intellectual copyright. He returns home for his father’s funeral after 13 years without ever attempting to make contact. His brother Magnus is in the flat above the motor cycle repair shop where he and his father worked. The place is a total mess, motor cycle parts mingling with food containers and all sorts of rubbish – no tea for a welcoming cuppa.
The antipathy between the brothers is obvious from the start: only a conversation about childhood games briefly suggests any kind of a bond. Ben is shocked to find his father had lived for years with MS and, in a different way, that Magnus has developed extreme right wing views, but the plot-line doesn’t develop in the conventional way.
Act 2, after the funeral, begins with Ben alone with Lyndsey, his first girlfriend, who to his surprise has attended the funeral. She, in a way, occupies the centre ground between the brothers and Lustgarten’s own political stance becomes ever clearer. She herself, as a black woman, experienced racial prejudice 20 years previously when applying to university and now she gets to deliver the ultimate judgement on the two brothers: Magnus is lost, savage and deluded, but she can understand him, but Ben bewilders her because he connives at the destruction of the working classes without even knowing or caring what he does. His long neglect of his family is symbolic of his turning his back on his upbringing.
So are the middle-class liberals complicit with the tycoons and billionaires in the destruction of our nation? The balance in the characters certainly suggests this. In a remarkable performance from Gareth Watkins, we, too, understand Magnus, tormented as well as bigoted, his one ambition – to be a skilled workman – thwarted by the factory’s closure, moved to tears by the memory of his father. Samuel Collings, less dangerous than Ben, is also less sympathetic in the complacency of his putdowns and the certainty of his own superiority. Lyndsey is a difficult character: Why is she there? The answer forms a dramatic conclusion and a shocking explanation of much that has gone before. Amelia Donkor preserves the uncertainty admirably, though rather overdoing the facial expressions.
Dritero Kasapi’s production in Hannah Sibai’s mess of a set is taut, seldom breaking out from the overall unease of relationships.
Reviewed on 11th February 2023. Touring nationwide.
