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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
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Music
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Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Michael Attenborough.
Cast: Steven Mackintosh, David Morrissey
Description: Michael Attenborough directs Neil LaBute's drama exploring the depths of family loyalty. Starring Steven Mackintosh and David Morrissey.
Trains: Tube: Highbury & Islington/Angel 
Phone: 0207359 4404
Website: www.almeida.co.uk
History boys: Steven Mackintosh as Drew and David Morrissey (Terry) play two brothers coming to terms with a troubled past in the Neil LaBute play at the Almeida
Neil LaBute, who offers audiences a feel-bad after-glow to take home with them, has issued another cautionary warning about family life. In a Dark Dark House, whose comma-less title would nicely suit a Fifties B movie, we are asked to savour and then be shocked by the cruel things American males in middle-class families do to each other and have done to them. I was surprisingly held in LaBute’s almost vice-like grip, kept in mystified suspense about just what people are up to in Michael Attenborough’s taut production.
Yet the ease with which intimate secrets are spilled out in the finale struck me as false and contrived, as if to inspire a collective audience gasp of surprise. On this occasion LaBute’s menu of horrors includes a speciality dish new to him: two brothers, Terry and Drew, hark back to when both appear to have suffered gay sexual abuse by an older teenager. What is more, Terry was beaten so hard and so often by his father, perhaps for sexual and sadistic reasons, that he retaliated by trying to kill him. In a Dark Dark House considers how the malady of abuse has lingered on and helped mis-shape their lives, leaving the brothers in unfraternal disassociation.
That, at least, is how it appears. But in LaBute you know that nothing is quite what it seems until the final truth-telling. Staged in 85 minutes and three scenes on Lez Brotherston’s manicured, double-level grassy grounds of a hospital, which later becomes a putting-green and a rich man’s garden, a 35-year-old, permanent adolescent businessman Drew, brilliantly played with phoney charm and subsequent anguish by Steven Mackintosh, is ensconced in the addiction unit to rescue him from the dependency which threatens his marriage. He wants help from his older brother, David Morrissey’s loudly belligerent Terry, a Kuwait veteran and security guard. You can see the social- emotional distance between them at a glance, though Morrissey lays awkward over-stress on Terry’s alienation.
The play’s big issue relates to loyalty, self-deception and mendacity. Will Terry corroborate Drew’s story that his addictions relate to long-ago gay abuse, thereby enabling him to escape prison on a dangerous driving charge. His agonised confession sparks a disturbed response from the unmarried Terry who reveals he so suffered at the same youth’s hands that he remains unsure whether he is now gay himself. That note of uncertainty is sustained in the second scene where Terry picks up a teenage girl, played with casual, seductive naturalness by Kira Sternbach, and finally in the brothers’ reunion after Drew is supposedly cured.
It would be unfair to reveal the significance of Terry’s encounter with the girl or what lies, secrets and not quite believable betrayals lie behind the brothers’ tribulations.
But LaBute draws his devious, devastating plot-lines together to imply misleadingly that a teenager who falls in love with his gay seducer will then lead a life of sexual abstinence and despair.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
And what, pray tell, Nick, makes you so authoritative on the subject of what sort of life a teenager who falls in love with his seducer will lead? Could it be that there is yet another play inside you waiting to be written? Has it not yet occurred to you that you might be far happier writing plays, rather than re-writing other people's?
- Bloke, London
