Camden Theatre: Parlour and Sing

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The Review - THEATRE by SIMON WROE
Published: 2 April 2009

Toby Jones and Amanda Drew

Pathos and paranoia in suburbia

PARLOUR SONG
Almeida Theatre

THE death of Harold Pinter late last year has left a large hole in the firmament of modern – and mordant – British theatre that one playwright alone may not be able to fill.
Writer in ascension Jez Butterworth takes a good shot at the moon, however, in this darkly funny treatise on paranoia and neighbourly betrayal in suburbia.
Of course, the four Desperate Housewives of the apocalypse have already dragged the genre (such as it is) through the mire and left it for dead. And if we’re being honest, the concept was hardly box fresh before that.
But Butterworth’s particular brand of lust and self-loathing in a Barratt’s cul-de-sac feels different.
It is not nauseatingly twee. It resists glibness. It does not laugh into its sleeve about the suburbs and their denizens. The three characters of Parlour Song – Dale, Ned and his wife, Joy – feel well drawn and real, and the jokes hinge on truths rather than clichés. In Butterworth’s book it seems the suburbs are okay.
The same cannot be said for the people. Ned (Toby Jones) is a blaster, a man who blows things up for a living. He spends his free time obsessing over the fate of his treasured possessions; one by one, from cufflinks to stuffed badgers, they are disappearing. For months he has not slept for fear of a terrible dream.
His wife (played by a sultry Amanda Drew) is also restless. The Scrabble games in the marital bed no longer appeal. Her eyes stray across Jeremy Herbert’s clever-but-cold set in the direction of their fitness enthusiast neighbour, Dale (Andrew Lincoln).
Toby Jones strikes a perfect pitch between crazed and mundane as Ned, revealing a hither-to undiscovered affinity for physical comedy in the scenes where he attempts to get fit or master cunnilingus through the use of a self-help tape.
At the centre of the play though, always, Butterworth’s language resides. His words echo and buzz and swirl between the bodies; the stuff of daily life made powerful through careful repetition and latent threat. A story about a birdbath, a conversation about making lemonade: these are imbued with rare resonance. If Parlour Song never quite reaches the dark heart of Pinter’s work, it remains a richly rewarding journey.
Until May 9
020 7359 4404

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