Grief, A New Play By Mike Leigh, Theatre Royal, Bath,
My love affair with Mike Leigh’s works began with the Grown Ups, made for the BBC Playhouse and shown in 1980 when I was reasonably newly married and after a "first row" descended into stony silence the television was switched on showing Grown Ups and the rift was repaired with hilarity all round. For the time, it was so different from anything we’d seen before, a sort of gritty kitchen sink drama but with such a twist of black humour it was quite compelling. Along with many others I suspect from then on we made all efforts to see everything and anything he wrote.
Grief (the name obviously took quite a while to come as at first it was known just as "a new play by Mike Leigh") charts the lives of a brother and sister over two years 1957 to 1958 who live together in genteel middle-aged respectability, Dorothy a war widow and her brother Edwin, a plodding clerk in an insurance company imminently due for retirement. Dorothy has a teenage daughter, full of undisguised boiling rage for her circumstances although we never find out the reason for this; the absence of her father perhaps or just teenage angst?
Dorothy once upon a time was a telephonist and has kept in contact with two friends, Gertrude and Muriel whose lives have taken very different paths, they have rich husbands and successful children and when they come to call they are obviously insensitive to poor Dorothy’s empty life, and regale her with an avalanche of their own latest colourful exploits. The local GP Hugh is the male version of them, never pauses for breath in his bragging and at each visit somehow his son has gained yet another degree or promotion.
Of course the cast to a man (or woman) are excellent. Lesley Manville as Dorothy, pained and worn down, Sam Kelly as Edwin, stout, unnoticed and uncomplaining (his retirement gift after forty five years service even has his name misspelled) Marion Bailey and Wendy Nottingham as Gertrude and Muriel respectively, both glamorous and garrulous, David Horovitch as Hugh, hearty and overbearing and Ruby Bentall as the sullen and resentful Victoria.
The play is a serious of "clips" of the family’s life with the change of scenes by the effect of the subtle removal or addition of props during a darkened few moments. A bleak theme runs through it, the ill-concealed misery of the central characters sharply highlighted by the brash optimism of their friends. A final horror ends the play on a jarring note and the title comes into its own. It runs for two hours without an interval and at times attention flags; however the brilliant performances overcome this. Did we enjoy it? Yes - but we did feel we took a parcel of gloom home with us but perhaps that was the point.
Jacquie Vowles
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