Review: HERE, Southwark Playhouse

A family drama is the winner of this year's Papatango New Writing Prize, held by the homonymous company. Chosen from a record number of plays submitted from all over the world, Clive Judd's debut Here is a purposeless examination of a household who ultimately can't communicate.

Set in the West Midlands, it revolves around Matt's (Sam Baker-Jones) unexpected visit to his aunt Monica's (Lucy Benjamin) home, where tensions between her and her daughter Jess (Hannah Millward) are high while his husband Jeff (Mark Frost) harbours his own secret.

It all sounds quite dramatic on paper, but the piece becomes a relentless plod-along. It's plotless and paceless. The characters are irredeemably broken and unchanged by their time on stage. Monica is an alcoholic, Jess is having an existential crisis, Jeff is a church-going gambler, and Matt's grief for his mother rules his apathetic life.

Yet, Judd's a talented writer. His dialogues are natural and vivid, but lead to very little. His exchanges are as quick as his silences are Pinteresque, but his sometimes overly poetic turns of phrase clash with the vernacular. The relationships he creates are poignant, but left unexplored. His characters are trapped inside their own limited lives, unable or unwilling to escape them.

Jess and Monica's rocky mother-daughter relationship is lifelike, as is Jess and her stepfather's, but Judd doesn't dive in, opting for an analysis of normal people with humble psychology. The addition of a supernatural vein has the show verging on a silly finish line. Sad, grieving Matt is after a sign from his grandfather, but ends up summoning his possibly dead mother.

There's no backstory and no explanation to any of their personal histories, which makes it difficult to care and empathise fully. In short, they're all dealing with their own battle, isolated in their own issues and reluctant to listen to one another. And then there's a ghost.

Artistic Director of Papatango George Turvey gives the piece an intriguing spin, removing the action from its theatrical context altogether by enclosing the stage in translucent mesh. The kitchen becomes a fishbowl of sorts, separated from the audience in an atemporal exercise designed by Jasmine Swan.

Asaf Zohar curates the sound design, which comes in intrusively and irresistibly. The cast don't share much synergy, but work as one to introduce a family with deep-rooted generational disputes. Millward and Baker-Jones are grimly delightful as the cousins who never get to the heart of the matter, while Benjamin and Frost are joyous as they dance around, draining their drinks, only to go off and sulk at one other.

For a play where nothing much happens, it lacks a grander message and is way too long for what it is. Papatango's winners are usually universally good, what happened here?

Here runs at Southwark Playhouse until 3 December.

Photo Credit: The Other Richard

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