The Stage

Our New Girl

Published Wednesday 18 January 2012 at 11:22 by Natasha Tripney

Nancy Harris’s unnerving play about parenthood is both blackly amusing and intermittently chilling. Having left her high-powered job as a lawyer, Hazel is pregnant with her second child, this time hoping to ‘do things right’. Her relationship with her eight year old son Daniel is icy at best and her surgeon husband, Richard, believes she isn’t coping so has hired a nanny without going to the trouble of telling his wife.

Kate Fleetwood (Hazel), Jonathan Teale (Daniel), Denise Gough (Annie) and Mark Bazeley (Richard) in Our New Girl at the Bush Theatre, London Photo: Tristram Kenton

This set up feels very familiar - with a touch of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a touch of We Need to Talk About Kevin - but Harris, especially in the second half, turns it into something more human and satisfying. The frequently absent Richard has set ideas about how Hazel should be raising their son, but is happy to twist things around for his own benefit when he is caught in a lie. Daniel’s behaviour starts to seem less and less threatening and more the result of some very mixed parental messages.

Director Charlotte Gwinner creates a very real sense of tension out of moments that might otherwise have felt like cliche - the pregnant woman balancing precariously on a chair - and Morgan Large’s set suggests wealth while also containing a sense of the clinical. Kate Fleetwood is superb as Hazel, a woman whose outwardly enviable existence hides a deep insecurity about her worth and ability as a mother, while Denise Gough is sympathetic and likeable as Annie, the young nanny and uneasy interloper in this increasingly fraught domestic world. Jonathan Teale, who shares the role of Daniel, also does strong work but Mark Bazeley’s Richard, while well played, is the most one-note of the characters, a little too overt in his villainy.