Home, I'm Darling

 Theatre Royal

I am a little bit reluctant to review Home, I'm Darling: it's a very interesting play, which keeps veering off in not-quite-the-direction you expect, and I wouldn't want to spoil, or indeed, Spoil it. Skip this if you are planning to see it (which I would recommend.)

The first "twist" comes in the first five minutes. Judy and Johnny (Jessica Ransom and Neil McDermott) are a perfect 1950s couple, in a perfect 1950s kitchen with a perfect 1950s fridge. Judy is making breakfast and packed lunch for Johnny and and Johnny is talking about how blissfully happy he is. They could be in a sit com or an advert. Johnny leaves for work....and Judy takes out her Macbook. They are not a 1950s couple at all, but a modern couple playing at living in the 1950s.

We've seen quite a lot of takes on this idea -- Pleasantville and the similarly titled Don't Worry Darling and even Wandavision and the Truman Show. It always seems to be the 1950s, I suppose because that was the era when television and advertising first took off. (Childhood nostalgia is more likely to be located in the 1980s, because that's when the people making TV shows grew up.) Although the play is a serious-comedy, we are asked to suspend disbelief about the batty premise. The fact that Judy could conduct this social experiment is not really questioned: the play is about whether she should and why she wants to. Johnny goes to work in the real world, but Judy cleans the house all day using period vacuum cleaners and cooks 1950s recipes using 1950s cookers. When Johnny's boss comes to tea, she gets served devilled eggs. Judy pours cartons of milk into old fashioned milk bottles and rice and tea old fashioned canisters. There's a 50s black and white TV which has been wired to show DVDs of 50s movies.

It seems they got into the hobby through a perfectly harmless liking for 50s music and dance -- they go to an annual convention called Jivestock -- but somewhere along the line they tried the experiment of making it real, and that experiment has turned into a lifestyle. There are moments where you think of George and Martha's game from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf: Johnny is blamed for breaking the rules when he goes for an office pizza in the mall at lunchtime.

Pretty much all the questions which arise from the scenario are tackled. Is Judy a bad feminist for positively wanting to be a servant to her husband, or a good one, because she has freely exercised her choice? Can you really stay insulated from the modern world if you are buying your period hardware on Ebay? It would be great fun to do up your house like the 50s (or the 70s, or, come to that, like the 23rd century) and to invite friends to come for 50s or 70s or Star Trek weekends, but does it become more fun and real if you are dancing around the room with a feather duster when no-one else is in on the game? (I have enjoyed immersive role-playing games, but at every moment you know that you only playing. If you really thought you were in a spaceship or a dungeon, you'd be terrified.) Should their friends respect their lifestyle choices? Judy's mum Sylvia (Diane Keen) lands the killer blow when she points out that Johnny and Judy are not living in the 1950s as they really were -- cold, poor, sexist and intolerant -- but in an imaginary version of them: a cartoon.

The set is itself a wonderful period piece; a front room and kitchen, with two visible upstairs bedrooms; the frontage taken off so we seem to be looking into a dolls house. And the whole situation felt a little like a reversal of that other famous dolls house play. Judy's identity is bound up in the domestic role-play: if she gives up 1950s, she doesn't know who she would become.

There was an interesting after show discussion (something the Bath theatre often treats us to) in which members of the audience asked the cast if the play was about feminism, or the menopause, or childlessness, or the consumer society. The play certainly asks us to treat the characters as characters (not tokens in a debating game) and the cast were highly engaged with the material. But I couldn't help thinking there was a rather large political elephant in the dolls house. Judy, it turns out, was brought up in a well meaning but sterile left-wing hippy commune, full of committee meetings and rotas and political demonstrations. As an adult, she has rebelled by retreating into an imaginary 1950s where everyone is shiny and happy, and there are (she admits) no black people or gay people. But it all breaks down because they can't afford it. Even if they grow their own turnips. She has entirely failed to take back control.

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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