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Winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama, at its best Polish-American playwright Martyna Majok’s ‘Cost of Living’ is a beautifully tender thing. But it does feel of a piece with a sort of excessively worthy naturalistic drama that the Americans are forever trying to foist upon us.
The very excellent Adrian Lester plays Eddie, a recovering alcoholic. In the fourth-wall-breaking opening scene, he’s (soberly) propping up the bar, telling us about the text messages from his deceased wife’s number that brought him there. It is a bravura monologue, exposition heavy, but full of the delicate hopes and dreams of a man who has refused to give in to despair even in spite himself.
Thereafter the play effectively opens up into a pair of two-handers. In one we move back in time to see Eddie tentatively reaching out to Ani (Katy Sullivan), his estranged wife. A recent paraplegic, she is volcanically angry towards Eddie, bordering on abusive. But little by little they reconnect with each other – in large part because of his dogged tolerance of her; he needs her more than she needs him.
In the alternating scenes, Emily Barber is Jess, a tough, well-educated but flat broke young woman who agrees to work as a carer for Jack Hunter’s John, a rich, urbane PhD student bound to a wheelchair by some unspecified neurological condition.
They’re an intriguing duo, both vulnerable in their ways, potent in others – of the less well-known actors Hunter makes the biggest impression as the slyly funny John, whose agenda remains tantalisingly inscrutable.
One notable thing about Ed Hall’s production is that Sullivan and Hunter are disabled actors – with Hollywood currently extricating itself from another ‘cripping up’ controversy over Bryan Cranston in ‘The Upside’, it’s heartening to see a fairly major theatre just get on with it in terms of casting.
That said, there’s something a bit disappointing about the eventual trajectory of the show, which builds to a climactic scene between Eddie and Jess, with Ani and John discarded along the way. I don’t think this has anything to do with disability, it’s just frustrating storytelling – John’s story arc simply stops dead; it’s been signposted from the start that Ani will die, but she’s written out in a wilfully underwhelming fashion (that squanders the play’s most dramatic moment – a shock near death scene that made my heart leap up into the ionosphere).
Majok has made a correct bet that a contrived ending will feel less so if it’s wilfully low-key. But it still doesn’t feel especially satisfying – it’s a play that prefers to drift elegantly rather than grab you by the throat.