Home at the Arcola – review

Dapper: Paul Copley as Jack in David Storey’s Home

In a country garden surrounded by rose-trellised walls and strewn with autumn leaves a weak sun is shining on two well-dressed elderly Englishmen discussing newspaper headlines, the weather, wives and the war.

But this garden does not belong to a country club or a hotel, as we might have thought, but to a mental asylum, and the two gents are gradually revealed to be its patients.

David Storey’s two-act play Home, first performed in 1970 has now been brought to the Arcola in the playwright’s 80th year by Seared productions, directed by Amelia Sears.

Harry, played excellently by Jack Shephard, is the more pensive of the two men, drawn to details such as the dust on the table, a cotton thread on his trousers and the edges of clouds.

Dapper Jack (Paul Copley) is more energetic, with a rakish trilby perched on his head, card tricks up his sleeve and a catalogue of anecdotes about his infinitely large family.

Jack and Harry mourn the England they once knew, even though their past is merely a threadbare patchwork blanket embroidered with truisms such as ‘wartime camaraderie’ and the ‘glory of empire’ – they cling to it nevertheless.

The veneer of respectability cultivated by Harry and Jack’s polite (if eccentric) chit-chat is shattered when they encounter two female inmates – limping and vulgar Kathleen (Linda Broughton) and the cutting Marjorie (Tessa Peake-Jones) whose probing questions o er disturbing insights into the backstories of the inmates.

Broughton plays Kathleen’s moment of tenderness towards the distressed Harry touchingly, and Peake-Jones has great comic moments as the shrewd Marjorie, yet Storey never really allows the female characters the same complexity or sympathy as the men, meaning they often appear as merely ‘salt of the earth’ caricatures.

We also encounter Alfred (Joseph Arkley), a disturbed ‘wrestler’ who spends his time carrying about the chairs the four pensioners are desperate to lay claim to, with obvious comedic effect.  The physicality of his mental illness has the disquieting effect of making the others look rather sane by comparison, adding a layer of complexity to the play.

Home is an intriguing and wistful piece of theatre, beautifully designed by Naomi Dawson, and while its oneliners and innuendos provide some light relief; at its core is a mournful sense of despair at the breakdown of communication, human frailty and the hardships of growing old.

Until 23 November at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin St, E8 3DL