Theatre review: The House of Shades

Anne-Marie Duff returns to the stage, bringing with her the usual trepidation over what her generally questionable taste in plays will serve up this time. Beth Steel's The House of Shades isn't among the dodgier shows I've seen Duff in (I made it to the end of this one,) but it does suggest that if you asked her if she wanted a side of subtlety with her political commentary, you'd get a firm "no thanks!" Blanche McIntyre directs a family saga of a Nottinghamshire mining town, spanning from 1965 to 2019 - from optimism about what the trade unions and the Labour Party could do to help the country, all the way to the fall of the "red wall." Duff plays Constance, who fled an abusive father in the only way available to a woman in her position: By marrying the first man who came along. But starting her own family with Alistair (Stuart McQuarrie) soon just turned into a different kind of trap.

Her daughter Agnes (Issie Riley, and later Kelly Gough) stays in the area as it decays after years of neglect, remaining faithful and hopeful in Labour. Son Jack (Gus Barry, later Michael Grady-Hall and finally McQuarrie,) marries a Conservative and becomes an enthusiastic Tory himself, eventually returning to the area he grew up in with a job-creating project that comes with some major caveats.

Constance also had a third child, but she treated Laura (Emma Shipp) harshly right up until her death by a botched abortion in her teens. Constance is haunted by a few figures from her past for the rest of her life (the ghosts are presumably the "shades" of the title,) but none more persistently than Laura. But while Duff is undoubtedly the star turn here, Steel's soapy epic is definitely a wider family drama, and if the ghosts haunting the matriarch remind her of ways she failed her close family circle, the ones haunting Jack carry much wider implications for the mark he's left on the world.

One thing you can't fault Steel on is ambition: The House of Shades is a memory play and family drama that serves as a history of the Labour Party's ups and downs, and the failures of both Left and Right to look after the UK's industrial regions, but it also wants to stay right up to date and be a state-of-the-nation play that investigates how those same regions could have taken such a sharp turn to the Right, demonising Polish workers, voting for Brexit and the Conservatives. Some of the parallels are quite on-the-nose; I doubt it's pure chance that Jack's wife Helen (Emily Lloyd-Saini) is a smirking Asian woman with a remarkable tin ear for anyone's version of things other than her own (she doesn't quite get the dead shark eyes but she's only an actor, she can't make the room go colder just by setting foot in it.) And while Jack's sweatshop is unnamed, it might as well be called something like Sporting Directly.

And as with most work that tries to cover so much ground, the results are mixed: There are some genuinely interesting insights, and if the storyline is essentially a soap opera it does have some standout plot twists in keeping with that genre (one particularly shocking moment left Phill with his hand over his mouth for five minutes, even though he was still wearing his mask.) On the other hand you can feel the writer trying to cram in as many aspects of the political landscape she's exploring into the story as possible, and even in storytelling as leisurely as this it can feel rushed. I was confused about the affable narrator figure played by Beatie Edney: Since the actors get replaced as their characters age I wondered if she was an older Constance but the timeline didn't make sense; turns out she's credited just as an unnamed Neighbour, and her later appearance as a much harsher character (presumably her own daughter or granddaughter?) is another rather blunt instrument in showing the changes in the area.

I'm not the only one seeing "Frankenstein's Vladimir Putin," am I?

I personally thought the way Steel deals with the story's gender politics was a lot more interesting than the politics-politics and would have liked to have seen more of that: Constance serves that purpose very well and is a great showcase for Duff's talents (including her musical theatre experience as Constance is a frustrated singer.) Her diva-ish pretensions express themselves in a fondness for Bette Davis quotes (an eccentricity her family refuse to acknowledge, let alone indulge,) and it's hard not to be in her corner as she tries to find the small freedoms in a life which her sex has put as many restrictions on as her class has. But some of the ways she tries to do this also spread the misery, especially to Laura, and if she's likeable it's despite, not because of her actions, which can edge into the monstrous - the reason they haunt her for the rest of her life.

Like most shows at the Almeida The House of Shades uses the real back wall to provide atmosphere and solidity to the design: Anna Fleischle's set is the shell of the family home, opening up not only the action but also the tonal differences. The play's occasional drifting into magical realism includes chatty corpses, and a dying Alistair being led to the afterlife by the ghost of Aneurin Bevan (Mark Meadows.) Duff gets to do some of the haunting herself, as her older self (Carol Macready) is reminded of some of the things she'd most like to forget. This too works with varying levels of success, which is my overall reaction to the play itself: The scope it tries to cover is impressive, but it sometimes gets tripped up by it, and I wished for more focus on the elements that really do work.

The House of Shades by Beth Steel is booking until the 18th of June at the Almeida Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 55 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.