Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
“I went to a lot of trouble to get sane”
Laura Ward Nokes and Madeleine Crowe’s production of The House of Yes is a slick, darkly humorous portrayal of a family whose ties in blood are perhaps more profound than they let on. Marty Pascal brings his new fiancée, Lesley, back to his family home in the midst of a hurricane. Here she meets the virginal and eager Anthony, the ethereal and potentially malignant Mrs Pascal, and Marty’s twin sister, Jackie-O, whose mental illness manifests itself as an unhealthy obsession for Jackie Kennedy and the assassination of her husband. As Thanksgiving dinner quickly degenerates, power play and a healthy dose of incest replace the menu.
The constant rumble of the impending hurricane simultaneously absorbs the audience into the Pascal home, and encourages an intuitive conviction that there is something anomalous going on within its walls. Appropriate, as the Pascal family seem to be living a disjointed, vacant existence which on Lesley’s arrival becomes intent on self-destruction. Lauren Oliver’s Mrs Pascal is astute, internal and deeply enigmatic. Her quiet ominousness is only conveyed through Oliver’s terrific delivery of lines such as “definitely the first. And I hope, the last”, that she announces with a pensive smile in a discussion on Lesley’s engagement. The focus is rarely on Mrs Pascal but Oliver’s elegance and impenetrable demeanour provides an unsettling flow to the scenes as she drifts from room to room. Laura Horton’s incessant twists and turns between humour and sincerity as Jackie-O are perfectly manic, and she spouts some of the play’s best lines with zealous ambiguity - “I didn’t mean to maim you, I just meant to kill you”. Her unflinching power play with Lesley and Marty makes her both fascinating and dangerous, and it seems impossible to anticipate the motive or direction for the malevolent gleam in her eye. Jonny Glasgow as Marty is contained and reclusive and until his breakdown, the most unsympathetic member of the family. Ziggy Heath’s Anthony plays with youthful innocence which contributes to the family’s only (rather vague) dose of normality. The Pascal family feels like a unit, you could almost visualise the family videos, and Emily Spooner’s Lesley could not stick out more, bumbling about in incredible '90s outfits, oblivious to the animosity rippling around her.
The split set works nicely, dividing the two ‘affaires de coeur’ (as Jackie-O would describe it) and allowing Mrs Pascal to flit, ghostlike, between her children’s sexual exploits. The sequence of scenes in Lesley’s room each beginning with a different Pascal arriving at the doorway was a nice touch and emphasised the imposition of Lesley on the household.
Intriguingly, Lesley doesn’t remain an outsider for long and soon she too is sucked into the Pascals’ twisted logic. In fact, I found it slightly unnerving how truly unaffected Marty and in turn Lesley were to the discovery of incest between the twins. The suspension of empty picture frames and mirrors, and a large floor-to-ceiling window convey the stillness and timelessness of the house, how everything that goes on there is contained in the space, buffeted but unmoved by the raging storm outside.
The stand-out scenes were definitely between Anthony and Lesley. Heath’s affable goofishness paired with Spooner’s wholesome pragmatism lead to some of the best comic moments of the show. Their timing was excellent, and their stunted romance utterly convincing. The relationship between Jackie-O and Marty was perhaps a harder one to convey and I did feel more sexual chemistry would have contextualised their partnership a little more. However the three siblings together were highly watchable as they swiftly switched allegiances and pushed each others' buttons.
The House of Yes succeeds in bringing you into the mad, disjointed world of the Pascals and convincing you that it exists in a relative state of normality, and it isn’t until the powerful denouement of the play that the audience is yanked back to the reality of why this family is so dysfunctional. Marty’s breakdown and the explanation for Jackie-O’s contorted, obsessive and protected understanding of the world becomes all the more uncomfortable, as the audience have laughed along with the phlegmatic manner with which her mental illness is dealt with by her family. Whilst the dialogue between the characters is dry and the humour covert, the desire for love and comfort is deeply embedded in their every action. You don’t know who or what to trust but the family are so enticing that you can’t help but get carried away by their house of ‘Yes’.
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