Plays about milk addiction are often rather dull. But this one is excellent. It opens with Gerald (Matthew Monaghan) acting out an infatuated dalliance with a carton of milk. He moves convincingly, his maniacal face absorbs and disgusts us, and the audience are hysterical.
His role is in some ways easiest from then on: after the family meet for breakfast he comes back and has nearly lost control of his language. As the play progresses he completely loses speech. However, in the opening he has fully presented his talent.
The play is one of dark absurdity, bordering on the surreal. They seem to eat nothing but cucumbers. It examines the way Gerald’s small-minded parents, Leslie (Richard Holland) and Margaret (Ed Pearce) attempt to deal with the irregularity of their son. Fully embedded in the Homeric code, they obsess about the ‘shame’.
The humour is based around a pastiche of the parochial and around the trope of the controlling family. Leslie and Margaret’s daughter Susan (Amelia Peterson) brilliantly acts the resigned and obedient foil to the, effectively, teenage rebel Gerald. The greatest reductio ad absurdam is the structured family meeting (with minutes) which is truly funny and shows how the parents care for only order and discipline, all empathy left for their daughter.
However, while the stock of wit is large, Oliver Rowse has perhaps only spotted a small body of customs and human idiosyncrasies to satirise. Jokes often hit at the same theme: the parish mentality – ‘we’d never be allowed to the village fete’, ‘no one will buy my chutney’; the fact that Leslie, just like his son, hasn’t grown up – ‘trains are a lifetime commitment’; or occasionally simple invective – ‘they’re as plain as your sister’.
This shouldn’t worry us too much. No doubt the jokes are really hitting at huge social flaws – a society which demands that a milk addict should be trampled with cows has probably gone a little wrong. Maybe I should have been looking for parallels with our own society.
But I think the best thing about this play is the ‘types’ that it generates and the brilliant way in which the actors present them. Richard Holland plays an understated patriarch, often holding his menacing words back from the brink of full anger, which would be far too histrionic. Instead of being suddenly awed, the audience becomes more and more convinced by his character continuum. Ed Pearce has imported her well-meaning Edwardian disapproval from some of her previous plays, but allows it to mutate, and thus she is, as always, convincing and engaging. The Doctor (Max Schofield) parodies that profession well, especially in his extended medical speech; Sergeant Napper (Ed Charlton-Jones) in turn offers a high-quality satire of his profession.
And both show that they have bought into this cow-trampling society. At least Leslie and Margaret haven’t done that.
four stars out of five
