Dreams of Violence

'You smell of menopause,' Hildy's twentysomething, ex-addict son comes home to tell her. And then, 'I hope you die.' It proves one insult too many, both for put-upon, wonderfully witty Hildy and for Stella Feehily's ambitious new play. As in 'Duck' and 'O Go My Man', Feehily again examines the diseases of a city's culture through the emotional unravelling of its inhabitants.

Here, it's latter-day London, with its greedy, blame-seeking individualism, that's under scrutiny, a toxic environment for defiantly socialist Hildy. Her mother, a rambunctious Paula Wilcox, is a faded pop star, petrified by booze and buzzed up on coke, her father a wild, rackety Irishman, holed up in his old folk's home. Her estranged husband, Ben, neatly delivered by Nigel Cooke, silkily offers money, great sex, perpetual philandering and endless lies. And her son holds her up at knife point. Amid the personal mayhem, Hildy attempts to radicalise the invisible, down-trodden office cleaners of Canary Wharf into demonstrating for a fair wage.

There's a deliberate hyper-reality to the excessive claims piled on Hildy's over-taxed heart, deftly staged by director Max Stafford-Clark, who draws a faultless performance from Catherine Russell as the fragile, ferocious Hildy. But while Feehily's keen intellect gleams, her play is bogged down, and bothered, by political and metaphorical mouthpiecing; her characters become so many cut-outs, the dogma sticks through the dialogue like bones through the play's skin. There's nothing trite or clichéd about this portrait of a woman's, and a culture's, inevitable breakdown. But the scenes that do ignite, between Ciaran McIntyre's mad, Irish Da, and his renegade curly-haired lassie, are a sadly sparse demonstration of just how blazingly beautiful Feehily's writing can be.