Review: Snake in the Grass, The Print Room

The tennis court at the bottom of the garden is unkempt. Its wire fencing has been invaded by ivy and its scuffed surface is unplayable. The net, a tangled knot left on the floor, has become a spider’s nest. You suspect that it has not been tended to for years, perhaps decades, and in those unchecked years it has festered inexorably.

The same is true of the two middle-aged sisters, whose demons surface in the wake of their father’s death.

Annabel returns from Austrailia to find her inheritance threatened by murderous accusations and blackmail against her sister Miriam, who had been acting as their father’s carer. In a bid to escape these threats, Miriam drugs her accuser, Alice (Mossie Smith), and disposes of her down the estate’s well. The ensuing clear-up operation, however, beats the dust from history and unsettles their respective ghosts.

Hitchcock once differentiated between surprise, when dinner is interrupted by a bomb, and suspense, when dinner is preceded by the setting of a bomb’s timer. Convention turns Snake in the Grass into the latter, but it is masterfully conducted by both Ayckbourn and director Lucy Bailey. While we’re braced against a watery return, Miriam and Annabel reveal abuses suffered at the hands of fathers and partners, such that they become all the more harrowing.

Bottled secrets and untended traumas have the unhealthiest of effects. Like the tennis court, the painted lines of which call to mind a pagan ritual circle, regular attention makes the better solution. Instead, we get a full on confessional, excruciating but ultimately cathartic.

Though there are some over-deliberate moments, Bailey’s production excels with clear-headed handling of its unearthed psychological disorder. Susan Wooldridge finds a crumbling solidity in Annabel, a woman too stubborn and self-absorbed to admit defeat, while Sarah Woodward manages the opposite as the freshly resolute Miriam, more used to total appeasement.

Woodward is, in fact, superb. Not only does she find a manageable mania in Miriam, she allows it to develop into Ayckbourn’s trademark comedy of class, frantically tidying evidence and brandishing spiked wine with an awkward impression of a born hostess. More often though, class goes unexplored in Bailey’s production, who glosses over the exploitation of the working class Alice, even as she’s doing the exploiting herself.

In truth, Ayckbourn serves up one spin too many with a final unnecessary twist aiming for surprise, but only deflating. It’s like watching a body in the throes of death, awaiting a final spasm with diminishing returns. Until that point, however, Snake in the Grass coils itself increasingly tightly. Only its not the tension that chokes, but the tears.