Actress Annie Hulley’s debut stage play brings new meaning to the phrase ‘make yourself at home’. Pitched somewhere between Joe Orton’s ‘Entertaining Mr Sloane’ and simple farce with a sprinkling of Pinter-esque weirdness, ‘Dog Days’ features a husband and wife being usurped from their house of 28 years by a seemingly friendly young couple.
This is far from a straightforward stitch-up though. By selling the family home and putting their marriage on a ‘break’, John is secretly aiming to extricate himself from wife Cate and shack up permanently with his bit on the side. When garish, new-money lovers Hayley and Tony turn up on their doorstep saying they want to buy the shabby ’50s semi, it’s a catalyst for the discovery of a whole heap of uncomfortable home truths.
The script has a few funny one-liners, which are mainly given to Lashana Lynch as Hayley, who delivers them beautifully. Peter Bramhill also has a nicely disarming twinkle as Tony. But mainly the characters are irritatingly one-dimensional: from the alky housewife Cate and uptight high-waisted John, to flash and cheeky East End bully-boy ‘Tone’ and big- earringed ‘Hayls’, there’s very little nuance.
We also remain unconvinced of the situation: beaten-down Cate, a role taken by Hulley, veers from rather sharp to unhinged to completely stupid. You can’t help but feel she would have seen her husband’s confessions coming a long way off. The exceptionally dark ending is confusing too, and Hayley’s reaction to it seems offbeat.
By the end, the play has gone from frothy comedy to something altogether darker without any believable progression, and it jars.