The domestic arrangement that the middle classes call a “men-age a trois” would be recognised by Sun readers as a simple three-some. In David Spencer’s gruelling new play, Darren, a divorced sixties music fan, moves in with Tina and her disabled teenage son, Ollie. So desperate is she for love that she allows Damen to watch porn movies in the house, dresses up for him and allows him to do anything he likes. But when she brings home his new 17-year-old lover Carol, Tina is punished to the brink.

Spencers writes with a rare ability to explore emotive issues – such as female jealousy, male manipulation and abusive relationships – without pontificating or being politically correct. Like playwright Paul Tucker, he is prepared to leave the cosy suburbs and explore the less previleged side of town: Psychologically convincing, desperately raw and bleakly funny, his play is at first a little cluttered with family detail, but soon emerges as a thumping plece of in-yer-face theatre – strong, violent and emotionally truthful.

After an unforgettably brutal opening with describes the killing of a cow, the play is tautly directed by George Ormond, who is helped by committed performances from Adrian Lochhead, Karen E Jones and Lorraine Hodgson as Darren, Tina and Carol, with Alexander Perkins making his stage debut as Ollie.

Blessed with an exhilarating sixties soundtrack, this powerful production by Critical Mass leaves a indelible impression of the excruciating impression neediness and appalling cruelty of love. It is a smashing show.

A love triangle that makes you wand to scream

Davis Spencer’s play starts von territory familiar to Royle Family fans and progresses to the ninth circle of relationshop hell. As the play develops, the circle constricts, drawing the audince into a vortex of romantic delusion and the psychological cancer of self-loathing.

The action begins with a documentary voice-over, describing how a cow becomes aware of imminent slaughter by smelling the fear and adrenaline of those preceding it. Throughout this portrayal of a love-triangle in a TV-dominated lounge, that image of a withless animal struggling helplessy towards its own destruction adds to the sense of catastrophical claustrophobia.

Tina has the sex appeal of a tub of lard, but when Darren agrees to set up home with her, a romantic paradise seems to beckon. Simon Sullions’s set evokes a love reach their apogee in a fake tiger-skin bed-heart inset with a cassette recorder to play everything from Frank Sinatra to Dusty Springfield.

Tina has a handicapped son, Ollie, and has been sterilised after delivering her second child still-born. Her problems start anew when Carol, Ollie’s 17-year-old babysitter, catches Darren’s porn-fuelled attentions, and moves into the flat.

Although the echoes of Spencer’s latest work are strongly televisual, both the structure and the lit-fuse tension make it a compellingly theatrical piece. The key factor in transforming Glass Hearts from a stereotypical story about a middle-aged man dumping his lover for a younger, perter model is inescably Karen E Jones’s powerful portrayal of Tina’s fermenting discontent as she demotes hersel to the doormat of all doormats to keep his love.

Director George Ormond has drawn out beautifull understated performances from Adrian Lochead as Darren and Lorraine Hodgson as Carol to complete this strikingly unequilaterial love triangle. There is no backhand to this compliment: it makes you want to run screaming from the theatre.

Kitchen sink, sinking kitsch
On one level David Spencer’s new play is a kitchen sink situation. Two sisters, Karen and Frances wash up, talk about the crud an telly and get drunk an a carton of plonk. Indeed, Land of the Living, looks, in brief flashes, like a television soap or sitcom.

But Spencers brilliance is to take the trite realism of those genres and move beyond it to far greater truths. He selects a slice of ordinary life and show through with grief. These Yorkshire housewives suffer domestic violence and martial strife. Both are struggeling to break free from their family past and cope with bereavement: the anger, guilt and loneliness caused by their mother’s suicide.

Spencer is psychologically searching. He plants depth charges in his characters. In the midst of the main action, fraught interior monologues surface or memories cut in, the latter played out by two young actresses depicting France and Karen as children (Sarah Doherty and the quietly intense Michelle Hardwick). Scenes can shift gear in a split second. The adult Keren tells lightbulb jokes: suddenly Frances is screaming and violent. So too, naturalistic dialogue flows into the patternistic, or grammar falls away, leaving a stream of consciousness thar has the impressionistic sweep of a Greek tragic chorus.

The production has its problems. Shimon Castiel’s set is confused and ugly. There is a television set on a box of quartz chippings and a sink set in a section of chuchyard wall like some fitted unit from the Stone Age.

Still, the combination of the concrete and abstract does fit Spencer’s mixes styles, and the chippings crushed underfoot disturbingly echo the suppressed explosions going off inside the characters.

Long, static monologues are broken up by the speakers stepping, between paragraphs, into different spotlights. This blocking, by director Sue Dunderdale is aimless but surprisingly unintrusive, principally because Sue Devaney and Lorraine Ahsbourne power though problems with their charged, sensitive performances as the older Karen and Frances.

Devaney (Karen), as tough and funny as she is wounded, delivers monologues with engrossing filmic naturalism. Ashbourne (Frances, nicknamed Frantic) is wild. She rides a couple of untamed soliloquies, keeping a firm grip through over-alliterative poetic lines, that lurch to and fro like a bucking bronco and would have a less determined actress out of the saddle.

Still, Spencer’s blend of vibrantly colloquial dialect with passages approaching verbal expressionism is engrossing, bold and – with a little tinkering – could be consummately theatrical.

Land of the Living, Spencer’s sequel to Killing the Cat, takes on socio-political issues including wife battering, homosexuality, incestuous love and the legacy of broken homes. But it does so with humanity and delicacy. Above all, Spencer depicts women’s live with great perception.

Focus on a family at war

Blessed by David Spencer’s lean script which ensures that anger bounces off
the walls of this tiny venue with full force, this impressive piece links family
break-up to social unrest, and provides meaty roles for an excellent cast.
Centering on the uneasy introspection of Danny (Sean Bean), who makes a trip
back to Yorkshire to grapple with his family background, “Killing the Cat” also
draws in a vivid portrait of a weak, blustering father (Henry Stamper) and
flashes back to a happy childhood which lasted until love was broken into tiny
pieces.
Sean Bean holds the centre well as Angry Young Danny, veering convincingly
from volcanic rage and biting cynicism, to weepy sensitivity and all-out
kindness. Henry Stamper provides a visceral treat as a father trapped by his
own insecurity.
Kate McLoughlin and Sally Rogers offer confident support as Danny’s two
sisters, while Valerie Lilley, as the mother, fixes your gaze with her descent
toward mental illness.
This harrowing scenario of alienation and lost love is thankfully punctured
by bouts of earthy humour. The acting is so electric the cast almost sits in
your lap.

David Spencer has written a play about the noxious effects of child abuse,
which is notable for the absence of campaigning rhetoric and accusing fingers,
and in which the social services are never mentioned. Perhaps it would be more
accurate to say that he is concerned with the breakdown of proper channels of
communication, which includes love, within a family – a breakdown which
incestuous love freezes and enforces rather than resolves. The effect in this
fine production directed by Sue Dunderdale has something of the dark intensity
of O’Neill (no accident that this is a family of Irish origin, living in West
Yorkshire) and also his structural awkwardness.

In Shimon Castiel’s design, the Theatre Upstairs stage is arranged
lengthways, giving it an uncommon breadth, to form a dingy, basement-like space
full not only of bicycles, dustbins, television and cat food but also of the
impediments of the past. This allows the play to develop simultaneously at
different levels of time.

Two of these are defined by the ages of the two actors playing Danny, the son
of the family who (in the present) has come back up north as an unemployed
writer to confront his and his family’s past. This Danny is taken with raw
energy, anger and desperation by Sean Bean. He also appears as a boy of 14,
played with quiet sensitivity by Dominic Kinnaird. Danny is the conscience and
recording angel of the family; the fact that he has written a book called
Killing the Cat, which reveals the family’s dark secrets, enables other
characters reading from it to speak what they would not normally say.

At the centre of the action is Danny’s father Sam, an immigrant Irish factory
worker imbued with charm, dignity and rich vowels by Henry Stamper. Behind the
charm lies an orphanage upbringing, violence, and a feeling that drink excuses
most things but not the stealthy abuse of his daughter Shelagh; he drinks to
erase the guilt.
Spencer is stronger on his male characters than on the female ones who are
the obvious victims. The sisters Kathy (Kate McLoughlin) and Shelagh (Sally
Rogers) react much more stoically than Danny, accepting that life must continue,
though the bricked-up room seems more and more like a prison. Their mother Joan
(Valerie Lilley) is seen at one point in catatonic despair, then walks out
without comment.

What increasingly seems to be the Royal Court’s house style – short, sharp
plays written in jagged, non-naturalistic stabs – is reinvigorated in David
Spencer’s “Killing the Cat” (Theatre Upstairs), the Soho Theatre Company
offering that won this year’s Verity Bargate award. Spencer lives in Berlin,
but his play returns him to the terrain of his earlier works, “Releevo” and
“Space”: working class Yorkshire and families living in a crisis that they can
barely articulate. His authorial alter ego, a writer named Danny (Sean Bean),
makes his need to comprehend itself a theme of the play, as the various
incidents from his turbulent childhood and adolescence are interlaced with
excerpts from the book, Killing the Cat, which we see him offering up to sister
Shelagh (Sally Rogers) for approval.

“Maybe I’ll write a comedy,” Danny tells his boozing father Sam (Henry
Stamper) at the end, in a curtain line that nicely avoids any possible
melodrama. And yet the mordant sarcasm of the remark is inescapable in the
light of what the play unfolds – a life marked by cycles of violence, pain and
repression, in which the sins of the swaggering Irish father seem inevitably to
be visited on his brooding and introspective Yorkshire son.

Uniting all the characters is a need for “the way out”, as Danny’s other
sister, Kathy (Kate McLoughlin), puts it. While Danny finds a catharsis of
sorts in prose, Sam seeks his escape route in drink, shutting out the memory of
prior incestuous episodes with Shelagh which Danny, discovering these belatedly,
calls on him to confront. Relegated to the sidelines is Danny’s divorcee
mother, Joan (Valerie Lilley), a woman condemned by her own inarticulacy to want
from life one thing which she couldn’t name, “so she couldn’t ask for it.”
Sufficiently expressive is the ashen-faced, wide-eyed Lilley that the part seems
even more disappointingly underwritten.

Sue Dunderdale’s direction makes adroit use of every aspect of the small
Court studio, as the six actors (Danny is in fact shown as two selves, Bean’s
questing adult and Dominic Kinnaird’s troubled child) lay bare a shared history
of unvoiced wishes and vague hopes, some of which, Spencer implies, may yet be
answered. On a hot night punctuated by thunder showers outside, this exemplary
company generated that unusually electric heat which comes from witnessing a
relatively unknown playwright on the verge of a breakthrough.

“Killing the Cat” opens with a fragmented sequence of moments from a family’s
history, past and present. Although the links between the fragments at first
seem obscure, each moment has perfect emotional clarity. The effect is
kaleidoscopic, as little shards of atmosphere, each one razor sharp at the
edges, gradually begin to resolve themselves into a pattern.

In a decaying house that was once the family home, Danny prowls around
sniffing out the past like a bloodhound. If the past won’t deliver itself into
his hands, he’ll hunt it down.

Danny’s mother used to tell him “You’re alright son.” but that was before she
went through the psychiatric mill, before they “plugged her into the national
grid system”. She wasn’t mad, she was just “fatigued with sadness”. Danny’s
sister Shelagh once thought that the things her father made her do were
“alright”, because if it’s your Dad and he tells you it’s alright, it must be.
Lost in an endless loop of actions, reactions and repetitions, Danny can’t
see a way of getting clear of any of it. “I’m not alright and I tell you I’m
not alright.” Sociologically speaking everyone in “Killing the Cat” is a victim
of some kind; but it’s not a play about passivity and victimisation, it’s about
loving, being sad and getting on with it. The characters are dynamic, if
confused, participants in their own lives.

The play received the 1990 Verity Bargate Award, and quite right too. David
Spencer’s writing is poetic, on the ball and very much alive. He manages to
play out a thread of real humour in the grimmest situations while avoiding the
pit of saccharin that lurks around the “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry” school of
drama. This production by the Soho Theatre company is beautifully directed (by
Sue Dunderdale) and the cast of six are universally excellent. Highly
recommended.

David Spencer’s award winning play, full of tense, inarticulate aggression, examines the corrosive legacy of sexual abuse as seen through the eyes of a young playwright, Danny, whose almost perverse determination to exhume his working-class family’s murky past rubs abrasively against their wishes. If the main dynamic is Danny’s quest for the root of his father Sam’s shadowy, drink- twisted guilt – namely Sam’s interference with his sister Shelagh (Sally Rogers) – it is deliberately obscured by what Danny thinks happened (the content of his play), what he has been told happened, what he remembers happening and what he
imagines to have happened.

The action shuttles between the ’70′s and the present day on Tom Conway’s
cluttered set; street lamps, dustbins and the expedient post-pub trappings of
armchair and TV evoke on the one hand council-estate familiarity and suggest on
the other the emotional and circumstantial impoverishment of the protagonists’
lives. It’s a surreal arena dominated by Henry Stamper’s ebullient Dubliner,
Sam, whose genuine, unaffected affection for Young Danny (Dominic Kinnaird) and
the older, wiser version (Sean Bean) is strongly contrasted to the harsh
intensity Danny employs to nail his father to the past to punish him almost in
order to forgive him. It’s the arrogance of a playwright and the festering hurt
of wronged youth, but crucially, the recognition on Danny’s part that he is
vulnerable to the same sin. In all, a demanding, complex work which Sue
Dunderdale directs with respect and sensitivity, exacting powerful performances
from the Soho Theatre Company.

Grown up boys

David Spencer’s new play, Space. is a poignant domestic drama set in a Halifax housing estate. Using an almost televisual linear narrative Spencer charts the relationship between Dean, a baker, and Pam, an unmarried mother and barmaid.

Through short scenes the playwright builds up the tensions of their affair and, superficially the play works well as an exploration of violence, emotional disappointment and the limitations of conventional married love.

But on a deeper level Spencer hints at the problems men have in reaching maturity and, as such, this is a brave work delying into a territory which is rarely explored by male playwights. Although Dean wants to marry Pam and legitimise their new baby, the only person he can really connect with is Pam’s son Kenny. Spencer shows young man and young boy jointly sharing the joys of physics and astronomy. Space is full of longing for the brightness of a child’s imagination and here Spencer hints that 19th century Romanticism is still vibrating from the hills surrounding the northern housing estate.

Juxtaposed against this world of poetic imagination is the violence expected from “real men”. Pam’s previous lover Mike is symbolic of this English machismo and, Spencer suggests, it is a world with which women have learnt to collude. He also makes it clear that in late 20th century Britain, imagination is a forbidden territory for women. If men want romantic love and babies, it is still women like Pam who have to take responsability.

There is an exciting mixture of poetry and harsh realism thoughout the writing and Spencer implies that we all carry the burden of our childhood histories into the sacred area of adult relationsships.

Pam expects every man to brutalise her as her father and lover did. Dean wants the comfort of a women who is more mother than equal partner.

There are strong performances from Paul Wyett as Dean and Elizabeth Rider as Pam, with equally good work from Douglas Seymour and Maggie Jones.