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.

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.