The pandemic has introduced out the budding playwright in Richard Eyre, former creative director of the Nationwide Theatre. He conceived The Snail Home throughout lockdown and it turns into, courageously, his first unique play in an enormous, wealthy oeuvre of directed and tailored works for stage and display.
This debut, which he additionally directs, is a household drama cum state-of-the-nation play cum story of medical misdiagnosis. As attention-grabbing as these components are, they don't make a unified entire.
It opens in an oak-panelled corridor the place a birthday dinner is being laid for Neil Marriot (Vincent Franklin), an eminent paediatrician, just lately knighted. Silver-service employees line up the cutlery; Neil’s spouse, Val (Eva Pope), arranges the flowers; his kids, Hugo (Patrick Walshe McBride) and Sarah (Grace Hogg-Robinson), bicker and bitch.
Eyre steers away from the cliched onstage ceremonial dinner by casting the motion within the “different” room, an adjunct to the place the friends are gathered, relatively like Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Get together in its dramatic positioning. However not like that traditional, the clashes don't really feel charged and the punches don't land. Sarah, a teen activist, speaks too tinnily about local weather emergency whereas Hugo, a cartoonishly drawn political adviser, wafts round delivering ethereal put-downs.
It's only on the finish of the primary half that some jeopardy gathers after catering supervisor Florence (Amanda Brilliant) reveals a backstory involving a unsuitable analysis in a baby abuse case which landed her in jail, and impugns Neil’s skilled judgment. However this strand disappears till the latter half of the second act when it's too shortly and tamely resolved.
There are additionally father and daughter face-offs which sound actual however are round and repetitious. Sarah is just too shrill however even then our sympathies cease in need of siding with Neil when he condemns her whole technology as one which does nothing however go on marches and put on rainbow ribbons. We get glimpses into the lives of the catering employees who often work together with the household, not at all times convincingly, however these aren't penetrating.
There are some good moments nonetheless: Hugo labelling the monarchy as “the chinless Kardashians”, Neil’s highly effective description of an orphanage in Ceaușescu’s Romania and the singing voice of upstart waitress Wynona (Megan McDonnell). However finally the script takes on an excessive amount of with out giving us sufficient, leaving this sense like a play unsure of its focus.
At Hampstead theatre, London, till 15 October
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