A mysterious atmosphere hangs over Simon Stephens’s new play, not just because the playwright takes his time to reveal a crucial piece of information, but also because the central character exists in a landscape in which she can’t take root. That’s Uxbridge for you. If the beginning is confusing, Lesley Sharp’s mercurial performance in the title role is ample reason to hang in there. Elegantly dressed, Harper is first seen unsuccessfully asking her boss – who claims to watch ‘measured amounts of porn’ – for time off as her father is in a diabetic coma.
Why can’t she tell her boss to stuff his job? Why is she drawn to a young lad her daughter’s age whom she meets on the bridge over the canal? Without telling her husband, Harper takes off to Stockport and is distraught to discover that she’s arrived too late to say goodbye to her father. She finds some comfort in anonymity as she lurches from one odd encounter to the next. The people she meets pepper their conversation unconvincingly with racist comments, including a coked-up local journalist whose leather jacket she lifts after improbably cutting him with a piece of glass (for a while I thought she had sliced him with a razor and we were in a different play). The jacket provokes comments from everyone she meets. Women of 41 aren’t supposed to wear such things unless they want to look like ageing rock chicks. Her buttoned-up mother (Susan Brown) was never going to approve and there’s a distressing confrontation between the two of them in which Harper is forced to hear some unwelcome news about her father.
Marianne Elliott’s sensitive production creates a heightened, dream-like atmosphere. The mood is troubling but one wouldn’t necessarily make the connection between that and the ripples of the Iraq War, although Stephens does in the programme. As a woman who finds the courage to confront her worst fears, however, Sharp conquers all.
