The Stage

Parlour Song

Published Friday 27 March 2009 at 13:35 by Aleks Sierz

When marital bliss turns into domestic boredom, how do you react? In Parlour Song, Jez Butterworth answers this question with a jaw-dropping mixture of paranoid fantasy, surreal nightmare and dreams of escape.

On a new suburban estate, Ned and his wife of 11 years Joy find that the cracks in their relationship are beginning to show. But when Ned confides in his neighbour Dale, a rattling chain of strange events - from the mysteriously missing objects that disappear from Ned’s home to the casual infidelity of Dale - are set in train.

Partly a painfully beautiful and excruciatingly agonized meditation on the business of living, partly a bizarrely hilarious comedy of suburban life and partly a lament for the disappearance of England’s nature in the face of new housing developments, this is a uniquely nightmarish play.

As directed by Ian Rickson, one of the few directors in perfect sympathy with Butterworth’s metaphor-rich and bleakly comic vision, the strong cast excels, with Toby Jones as the edgy Ned, Andrew Lincoln as the laidback Dale and Amanda Drew as the sultry Joy. Some scenes - for example, when Ned tries to improve his cunnilingus technique or when the two men try a gymnastic workout - are wildly hilarious, but the laughter always dries on the lips.

Helped by designer Jeremy Herbert’s bare, modernistic set, with threatening projections and an evocative soundscape by Paul Groothuis, this is a deeply moody, emotionally intense and superbly written account of the worm in the bud of contemporary suburbia. Its zany imagination is also a slap in the face of British new writing’s default mode of literal naturalism.