Written for Culture Wars
In his twenties, Martin Crimp wrote Definitely the Bahamas about a couple in their fifties. Now, in his mid-fifties himself, he has reversed the procedure with Play House, which centres on a couple in their twenties. The two shorts inform one another beautifully: one is the photographic negative of the other.
Initially, Definitely the Bahamas must have read as a clinical examination of a specifically middle-class species of middle-age. The play is sharp and sniping, unforgiving of the sort of suburban superciliousness that peers down its nose at others while ensuring it’s own looks perfectly powdered and blemish-free at all times.
Milly and Frank, a retired couple, natter judgementally about an acquaintance whose home was burgled while she was away in the Bahamas. (Or was it the Canaries?) More importantly, they keep careful tabs on the comings and goings of their young Dutch lodger Marika (Lily James) and speak gushingly about their thirty-something son Mike, who seems rather more unpleasant and manipulative than they would ever be willing to concede.
Yet, next to Play House – which is the feistier of the two – it’s emphasis changes from class to age. The needling criticisms of this prickly attack seem tempered by some level of understanding. It’s as if Crimp is, to a certain extent, empathising with those he once admonished.
Together the plays show the almost inevitable slant into conservatism and, alongside Play House’s gregarious young couple, Milly and Frank’s civil bitchiness comes across as a sad reflection of their own empty lives. They seem to sit on sofas, cups and saucers in hand, and live vicariously through the younger generation or replay their own pasts, bickering over the details of their memories. If, as George Bernard Shaw once quipped, youth is wasted on the young, middle age offers nothing to waste but dead time.
In Play House, Simon and Katrina have moved into their first house together. In short scenes, almost flashbulb snapshots, we see fragments of their daily lives. Everything is an adventure. Even scraping the congealed gunge off the fridge is exciting. There are promotions and pills, arguments and sex. Both relish their newfound adult status, even though they don’t really feel it. They dive into the game of life, viewing even Katrina’s occasional psychotic episodes (which she seems to have inherited from her father) as challenges of their maturity and independence.
Their scorn for others is different to that of Milly and Frank. It is more brazen and condescending, almost a matter of lauding their energy, activity and, most of all, their freedoms over others. In short, they believe they’re living life as it is meant to be lived: drinking and shagging and enjoying everything without needing anything more.
Nonetheless, insecurities lurk; they’d love a bigger, less shitty flat, higher salaries, to be taken seriously. “Why can’t we say or do or think anything of importance?” asks Simon. Here one sees the beginnings of the inevitable slide towards all that they despise: middle-aged conservativism, bitterness, regret and, possibly, psychosis.
Crimp directs both pieces with the same clinical crispness of his writing. Definitely the Bahamas is staged as the radio play it initially was, emphasising the fakery on show and bringing tell-tale vocal tics to the fore, while Play House lays out its props like scientific apparatus to emphasis the irresistible lure of material success. Kate Fahy is all quivering niceties and barbed compliments as Milly, opposite Ian Gelder’s lethargic, let-me-be Frank. Lily James, who also plays Marijke, and Obi Abili invest Play House’s younger couple with just the right edge of vitality that’s simultaneously enviable and erosible.
Photograph: Robert Day
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