Guess who most looks likely to break Alan Ayckbourn’s record as the most prolific dramatist in Britain? Without doubt it’s Roy Williams, who is busy penning commissioned plays for the National, the Royal Court, Out of Joint and the Almeida — where he is writer in residence — and the RSC, which is also about to revive his Iraq play, Days of Significance. How does he find time to eat, sleep, observe the passing scene or simply sit and listen to the British Caribbeans whose bard he has become?
Luckily he’s also one of our ablest dramatists, capable of writing cracking dialogue. There’s a scene between two bitter brothers in his new Angel House — which is en route to Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leeds, Salisbury and Northampton, if you want another upmarket list — that couldn’t have been better done by that specialist in fraternal angst, Sam Shepard. Yet there’s a tiny, cavilling voice in my head that wonders if he’s in danger of stretching his theatrical elastic to breaking point — or at least spreading himself a bit thinly.
Angel House is part of a London sink estate that’s been bought and developed by Richard Blackwood’s Stephen, who was brought up there in poverty by Claire Benedict’s Jean, an immigrant from the West Indies abandoned by her feckless husband. Stephen is clever, politically ambitious and in every obvious way to be compared with his brother, Frank (Mark Monero), who is about to be imprisoned after a cache of weed was found in his living room. But which, really, is the good son and which the bad one?
The answer comes in that climactic quarrel in which resentments dating back to puberty and beyond are powerfully aired, and I can’t reveal it without spoiling the play. Enough to say that it involves treachery, sacrifice and much else. The play’s overriding purpose seems to be that love and hate are closely allied and that the first can transcend the second, an idea echoed elsewhere in Paulette Randall’s production.
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But here, perhaps, is where the evening begins to feel cluttered. The supporting characters include a violent drug dealer who cares a lot more than first appears for his troubled son and the gay boy who once had a mild fling with the same young man. It also seems that Stephen’s father is actually the family friend who still wanly adores Jean, though Stephen himself never discovers a fact that anyway assumes less importance than it should. You persistently feel that there is more to be said about the characters and their relationships. Yet isn’t that better than feeling that they outstay their welcome?
When Jean is talking to Geoff Aymer as the ageing swain who “loves you so much I hate you”, or when the excellent Monero, as the thuggish but quietly heroic Frank, is battling Blackwood’s slippery Stephen, you know that you’re in the hands of a fine writer.
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