Curtains
Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames Until Mar 17, 2hrs 25mins
Poor old Ida is almost completely out of it as her family gathers to celebrate her 86th birthday.
She’s infirm, incontinent, demented and in pain. Ida (Sandra Voe) says very little – mostly the word ‘no’ – and sicks up her birthday cake, as if in disgust that she should still be alive.
The family talks in that desperately chipper manner reserved for the senile but the gathering takes a turn for the worse when one of her daughters decides to kill her.
Ida (Sandra Voe) says very little – mostly the word ‘no’ – and sicks up her birthday cake, as if in disgust that she should still be alive
Saskia Reeves (above) plays posh Katherine and Wendy Nottingham is selfish Margaret, while their husbands are acted by Jonathan Coy (above) and Tim Dutton
This 1987 euthanasia play brings to mind the poet Arthur Hugh Clough’s line ‘Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive officiously to keep alive.’ The NHS these days would prefer to treat age as a curable disease; the author of Curtains, Stephen Bill, has other ideas. He gives us a play that is partly a crime scene cover-up and partly a debate about how the old should be allowed to pop off with some dignity still intact.
The action is set in Ida’s rancid home – a riot of mildewed wallpaper. At the family reunion are her middle-aged daughters (Saskia Reeves’s posh Katherine and Wendy Nottingham’s selfish Margaret) and their husbands (Jonathan Coy’s insufferable, pompous Geoffrey, Tim Dutton’s failing farmer Douglas). There’s also Ida’s blurt-it-out grandson Michael (Leo Bill) and a no-nonsense neighbour (Marjorie Yates).
The arrival of long-lost daughter Susan (Caroline Catz of Doc Martin fame) ramps up the sibling friction. The house is in Birmingham and the cast have Brummie accents to match. You can tell it’s the Eighties because of the clothes and a trifle that comes with nostalgic stuff called Dream Topping.
Saskia Reeves is excellent as the sister who psyches herself up to do the merciful thing for her mother – a shocking scene many will find unwatchable. The second act is taken up with the family facing the fear of discovery by an unseen doctor who is taking his time issuing a death certificate in the next room.
But while you can only admire the play’s guts, the freeze-in-your-throat laughter has done a bunk. The chemistry between the cast doesn’t quite fizz and Lindsay Posner’s careful production is locked in, rather than liberated by, its Eighties time capsule.
Without the release of laughter, this comedy feels a bit deadly in every sense.
Harold And Maude
Charing Cross Theatre, London Until March 31, 2hrs 20mins
Rating: 
Harold And Maude was originally a 1971 film that got a pretty lukewarm reception, though the years have been kinder, and this vaguely hippie-ish, anti-authoritarian tale of the unconventional relationship between two oddballs – a 19-year-old man and a 79-year-old woman – became a minor cult favourite. The screenplay writer Colin Higgins was minded to turn it into a play in 1980.
Harold (a lanky, awkward Bill Milner, above with Sheila Hancock) is a weird loner who likes going to funerals and frequently stages faked, violent scenes of his own demise
Luckily, this production has the benefit of Sheila Hancock as Maude, a mischievous and mysterious mitteleuropean lady swathed in colourful ethnic clothing who takes a dim view of anything restrictive and has a lax attitude to property and ownership – she even liberates a seal from the zoo. Her motto is to live for the moment and do something new every day – like yodeling.
And that’s the attraction for Harold (a lanky, awkward Bill Milner), a weird loner who likes going to funerals and frequently stages faked, violent scenes of his own demise, even in front of the prospective girlfriends his socialite mother (Rebecca Caine) is constantly trying to fix him up with. After Maude’s gentle tutelage – and thankfully in affection rather than sexually driven – he eventually asks her to marry him, though she has other ideas…
Thom Southerland’s production is suitably quirky but uneven, and employs a group of actor/musicians to break up the tale – a wise move since it tends to drift along in too one-note a fashion. You feel as if you’re drowning in whimsy in a piece that, in these harsh times, seems dated and naive rather than charming. Thank heaven for Hancock.
Mark Cook
Gundog
Royal Court, London Until Sat 1hr 40mins
Rating: 
What happened to the gundog of the title? I was hoping for a few dead partridges to crash on stage to be retrieved by a well-trained theatre spaniel. However, dog-lovers will find scant appeal in this unbelievably bleak slice of rural life.
The stage consists of mud with a rotting sheep’s carcass that doubles up as a dying dog. Two young sisters, one cradling a 12-bore, befriend a tragic young immigrant looking for work
The stage consists of mud with a rotting sheep’s carcass that doubles up as a dying dog. Two young sisters, one cradling a 12-bore, befriend a tragic young immigrant looking for work. The girls seem to be rustling sheep.
They’ve no money, mum’s dead, their brother is a useless lout, the farmhouse is falling to bits, the local pub has closed down, grandfather has got dementia, and we don’t meet dad until he’s hanging from a tree.
Oh, the joys of farming! Laughter is off the menu in Simon Longman’s almost unendurable play, written in a downbeat poetry of despair and performed by a young cast who’ve been told to pile on the agony by director Vicky Featherstone. I can’t see our young farmers flocking to this in any great hurry.
The York Realist
Donmar Warehouse, London Until Mar 24, 1hr 50mins
Rating: 
Most gays these days are out and proud – and sometimes loud. Which is grand, though what a pleasure it is to see again Peter Gill’s understated 2001 play set in the Sixties, in which – in this production at least – a gay couple barely touch each other. Shopping And F**king this is not.
George (Ben Bratt, above) works on a farm in a remote part of Yorkshire with his ailing mum. He doesn’t exactly wear his heart on his rolled-up sleeve
George works on a farm in a remote part of Yorkshire with his ailing mum. These are plain-speaking folk, and George doesn’t exactly wear his heart on his rolled-up sleeve. So when John, a theatre director from London (a nicely gauche Jonathan Bailey), persuades George to work on the York Mystery Plays, a spark is kindled for a short while.
The dalliance fades but when his mother (Downton Abbey’s Lesley Nicol) dies, George finds himself free to live the full, romantic life he desires. All this is played out amid the domesticity of the flagstone-floored cottage with its outside lav, family popping in and out and endless cups of tea in Robert Hastie’s nuanced production.
Gill’s text ripples with the undertow of class differences, social change and the illegality of the gay liaison but reveals most in what is not said. At the end, George’s stoic desolation – hauntingly portrayed by Ben Batt, above – is utterly heartbreaking.
Mark Cook
‘The York Realist’ is at the Sheffield Crucible, Mar 27 to Apr 7