The Stage

In a Dark Dark House

Published Friday 28 November 2008 at 16:30 by Jason Best

Neil LaBute has dedicated his new play to Sam Shepard, whose work he aptly describes as “rife with difficult fathers and brothers at each other’s throats”. Boldly venturing into the older playwright’s territory, La Bute’s In a Dark Dark House presents us with a pair of troubled siblings, although the difficult father is only a haunting unseen presence.

We encounter David Morrissey’s Terry and Steven Mackintosh’s Drew in the grounds of a private psychiatric facility - a split-level manicured lawn surrounded by lofty pine trees and expensive-looking shrubbery in Lez Brotherston’s impressive set, which doubles up in the play’s subsequent scenes as a mini-golf course and a rich man’s garden.

Slick lawyer turned wealthy businessman Drew has been confined for observation following a drink driving smash and wants elder brother Terry to corroborate his claims that his addictive behaviour has its origins in childhood sexual abuse by a family friend. Affecting the ‘whatevers’ and ‘dudes’ of current teen speak, Drew might plausibly be locked into immaturity by trauma, but both he and the truth are far more slippery than this glib prognosis.

Morrissey and Mackintosh’s body language tells us right away that it’s the buttoned-up Terry rather than the hang-loose Drew whose life has been most bent out of shape by childhood experience. “I’ve spent most of my adult life hiding,” he admits. “Hiding in plain sight by being quiet and doing my work and never raising my hand.”

LaBute is typically provocative in exploring the consequences of child abuse, not least in the play’s uncomfortable central scene in which Terry has an awkwardly flirtatious encounter with Kira Sternbach’s sassy 15-year-old jailbait, Jennifer. Not everyone will agree with some of the positions LaBute appears to take, but however suspect the psychology, Michael Attenborough’s superbly acted production turns the brothers’ dark family history into powerful drama.