Last of the Haussmans
11th October 2012
I saw this play as a live broadcast from the Lyttleton to
the Gulbenkein cinema on the last night of the run and wished I could have seen
it again.
I agree with the reviews about its strengths and weaknesses,
its Chekhovian atmosphere, Julie Walters’ and the others’ brilliant acting and
the way it struggled to bring together the threads at the end. I thought the set was overdone and
dominated too much, but enjoyed the local references having lived briefly in the South
Hams, among the millionaires, across the water from a Dimbleby, and down
the road from relentlessly New-Age Totnes.
The family dynamics were fascinating. Something not mentioned in any of the reviews
is the influence of absent fathers. I
think the play is less about the legacy of the 1960s and more about parenting
in general. We learn that Libby and Nick
were brought up by their grandparents whilst Judy carried on travelling, but
nothing about their father, not even whether they had the same one. Libby’s daughter, Summer, visits hers and
falls in love with his orderly life – but that’s all off-stage. Peter, the cringe-making trendy doctor, has a
jealous wife but there is no mention of children. Daniel, the sexy pool-boy has an invalid
mother, but no father.
Judy, the ‘unreconstructed hippy’, has a very clear morality
and no regrets about her life. She knows
what’s important and her opinions are coherent. By contrast, her adult children
are lost – Nick to addiction and Libby to unsatisfactory relationships. Their desire to make it right with their mother struck me as slightly pathetic - perhaps there's a point here about my current generation who have largely replaced idealism with anxiety, to grow up and stop blaming what's gone before. Judy is still fully engaged with life in a way they can't be.
There appears to be hope for Summer who is
weighing the different life options open to her and for Daniel, who as a kind of
angelic observer, is able to make his own life.
The doctor, Judy’s generation, is hedging his bets – able to be a dope-smoking
advocate of free-love as long as his
wife doesn’t find out but deep-down driven by a bourgeois interest in property and
reverting to suit and tie when his life-style is threatened. The ambiguity of his affections is complex and rings true.
The house as a plot device harks back to Chekhov – as a
symbol of changing societies, the loss of wealth (of all kinds), and also as
something that touched him personally when his childhood home was bought and
demolished by a family friend. The title
of Stephen Beresford’s play with its pun, makes the house allusion key.
Houses, and their value, are one of the most divisive social issues in the West Country, writ especially large in the South Hams
where no ordinary local person could ever hope to own property without
inheriting it.
Judy may have been an ineffective mother to her children and
the star of the show, but for me it is characters like Peter, moving into
households where fathers, and all they represent, are absent, who are the more
destructive, reminiscent of our current culture of late capitalism where the
greedy can exploit the idealistic and damaged, under the guise of a dodgy paternalism.
