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It never Raines but it pours. Nina Raine’s hit play ‘Tiger Country’ finishes its second run at Hampstead Theatre just as her brother Moses Raine’s ‘Donkey Heart’ opens in the West End following a run at the Old Red Lion last year.
The menagerie under the microscope here is a human one. Moses’s play (which Nina also directs – keep up) is set in a cramped Moscow flat inhabited by three generations of the same family. The father, Ivan, is a volatile and domineering sort, who his children have good reason to suspect of straying. Daughter Sasha is engaged in a directionless relationship with Englishman abroad and general exposition-engine, Tom. And Grandad is a survivor of the Leningrad siege with his share of stories about the country’s turbulent past.
Both Raine siblings are good at writing familial disharmony and, in particular, explosive fathers. Moses also accurately pins down what it is to share a small flat with a large family: the impact of living on top of one another, the little irritations, and the complete lack of privacy and personal space. But the play is less confidently plotted – there are times when you can too clearly glimpse the narrative machinery grinding away beneath the surface – and while it’s engaging as a family drama, it feels less concerned with life in modern-day Moscow.
James Turner’s set, however, is an absolute treat – full of wonderful, just-right details down to the ashtrays and the tablecloths and the Russian icons – though it sits less well in the space here than at the Old Red Lion. Strong performances help smooth out the play’s rougher edges, particularly from Lisa Diveney as the put-upon Sasha, Pierre Atri as appealingly odd youngest son Kolya (a role he shares with Albie Marber) and Patrick Godfrey as the grandfather who is in many ways the heart of this engrossing play.