It’s second time around for Paul Robinson, who directed this Athol Fugard two-hander five years ago at the Southwark Playhouse. This time he has Saskia Reeves and Rafe Spall as the sister and brother coming together in their parents’ tumbledown shack of a house to fight out familiar battles.
We’re in Port Elizabeth in the ’60s, though the political situation in South Africa is barely alluded to. This is an inward-looking play, halfway to Beckett, with its two damaged individuals trying to find ways to live with the past. Spall’s Johnny is consumed with it, clinging to his role as carer for his old, bed-ridden dad, asleep in the next room. Reeves’s Hester is a bitter refugee from the past, only back to get her share of her hated father’s compensation money from a railway accident.
These are two great roles for actors, and Spall especially makes the most of Johnny’s antic behaviour, obsessively picking away at his own mental state even before Hester barges in. Reeves takes longer to make an impact; at first all you can do is marvel at her truly frightening hairdo – she looks like a Stepford wife gone badly to seed. The second half, as the family’s past spills on to the stage, gives them more chance to rage but the ending might leave you with a shrug of the shoulders. You don’t take Johnny and Hester home with you; they’re left in their own private hells.
