Theatre review: Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew

If there was a touch of damning with faint praise to me calling Otherland "nice" a couple of days ago, the term feels as appropriate, but without the backhanded element, for Coral Wylie's gentle family drama Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew. As families go it's an eccentric quartet, in that the member with perhaps the biggest influence over the others has been dead for decades. In Debbie Hannan's production Wylie also plays Pip, who came out as bisexual to their parents a little while ago to little drama, but whose more recent coming out as non-binary still has Lorin (Pooky Quesnel) and especially Craig (Wil Johnson) struggling to get used to. To Pip this all blends in with their general feelings about their parents being rather distant and uncommunicative; Craig tends to disappear to his allotment, which they're vaguely aware has some connection to his dead best friend Duncan.

When Lorin starts clearing out some old clothes, among her own and her husband's she finds some of Duncan's, including a colourful '80s ski jacket that she gives to Pip, not realising one of his diaries is in the pocket.

So through this they get to connect for the first time with the person whose relationship with their parents was so close, it had been expected that he'd have helped raise the child as a third parent. The biggest surprise is that Duncan had been a proud and flamboyant gay man, and through the diaries Pip gets to experience Duncan (Omari Douglas) as the queer black role model they always needed. They also get to see their parents in a very different light, and struggle to see them as the same people who kept his sexuality a secret, even as their child was discovering their own identity.

So the play also works as a story about how we can never quite know who our parents were before we knew them, as well as an exploration of grief: 26 years on, the loss of his best friend still hurts Craig so much he's literally put any reminder of him into storage; this is also what leads to the play's biggest conflicts as he clashes with Pip's attempts to get to know Duncan through his writing.

But although not without drama this is predominantly a hopeful play about reconnecting both with family and with the queer community that went before. It's interesting to see another young LGBTQ+ writer join Jack Holden in wanting to connect not just with queer history in the abstract, but also specifically with the generation lost to HIV/AIDS whose stories seem to have been kept from them. (There's enough time since It's A Sin aired that it might reasonably have inspired this aspect of the play, which also makes me wonder if Douglas was who the writer always pictured as Duncan.)

The horticultural theme is nicely integrated, particularly the way the plants in the title are connected in different ways to queer history (Lavender as a code and euphemism, Hyacinth through the myth of its creation, Violet as a symbol of Sappho and Yew for its non-binary reproduction; plus I guess it also reclaims the yewtree from, you know.) As Pip takes on some of the peacemaking role Duncan had in the relationship (Lorin even acknowledges that some of their conversations are getting replayed verbatim,) flowers filling the stage become a visual metaphor for the family healing, and by the end they've got nearly seventeen hanging baskets in this back garden, believe it or not.

Unfortunately I would also class this flowery finale as a case of Multiple Ending Syndrome - I understand the wish to give Pip's "Duncle" the last word, but I still think it unnecessarily repeats conclusions we've already had established. So maybe Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew could have benefitted from some selective pruning, but it still offers up a lot to like.

Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew by Coral Wylie is booking until the 22nd of March at the Bush Theatre's Holloway.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.