★★★★★
This is both the least dramatic and the most dramatic show of the year. It’s certainly my favourite. Alexander Zeldin’s play is about two homeless families forced to live together in temporary accommodation. He has blurred the line between audience and playing area, bathing us all in strip lighting and having his characters make one or two incursions into the seating just as they sometimes invade each other’s space.
Natasha Jenkins’s communal-area set, with its sink and kitchen table, its Jack Vettriano print on the faded yellow walls and its single toilet — not nearly enough for a family of four living in a room next to a middle-aged man and his ailing, incontinent mum, not to mention the two refugees down the hall — is as real as the acting it hosts.
And if the ultra-realist premise of 90 minutes in a homeless hostel sounds like a hair-shirt punishment for the pampered theatre lover, nothing could be farther from the truth. What slays you here is not the deprivation but the minutely detailed depiction of real people (well, they feel like real people) pushing on despite it.
Zeldin devised his show with the cast, with input in rehearsals from people living this life. And as Dean and Emma and their kids wait on hold for the council to sort out their benefits, as Colin and Barbara wait to be rehoused after 12 months here — never mind that six weeks is the legal limit — it’s the lifelike exchanges, the tiny tussles for territory, that grip you tight.
Emily Beacock melts the heart as the schoolgirl with her Frozen backpack getting ready for her school Nativity, complaining about her grumpy big brother and her hunger pangs. Luke Clarke, as dad Dean, gets ratty, apologises, struggles, copes. Janet Etuk as the heavily pregnant stepmum frays at the edges and clashes with the slightly inappropriate, sweary Colin (Nick Holder). Yet there is no harm in Colin. Zeldin shows us friction as everyone jostles for personal space and autonomy, but shows us kindness and dignity and lots of love without turning sugary.
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The play holds its nerve. It’s about whose mug is whose, who’s making too much noise, who’s clearing up when Barbara (Anna Calder-Marshall) soils herself. It’s gripping, amusing, uncomfortable, desperately moving, but not dramatic in the sense of speeches and shouting, accusations and political solutions, heroes and villains. Instead it teems with life at a micro level as it shows people exactly like you and me trying to cope with not enough resources, not enough space, not enough time. What could be more dramatic than that?
Box office: 020 7452 3000, to January 10; Birmingham Rep (0121 236 4455), January 26 to February 11