The Kitchen Sink, Bush - review

Comic and poignant: a beleaguered Kath (Lisa Palfrey) with son Billy (Ryan Sampson), who dreams of going to art college
10 April 2012

It's always salutary to be reminded that the best plays can be about the smallest things. While so much drama focuses, rightly, on events of personal or political magnitude, Tom Wells takes as his deceptively small-scale focus four members of a largely happy family whose lives all require a gentle change of gear. The result is comic, poignant and utterly gripping.

The title is a crafty allusion both to Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle and, of course, a certain genre of British playwriting. Kath (Lisa Palfrey), Martin (Steffan Rhodri), Sophie (Leah Brotherhead) and Billy (Ryan Sampson) aren't angry, though, just quietly anxious that their home in Withernsea, Yorkshire, is in the middle of a rapidly contracting landscape of unskilled jobs that, for generations, have been performed with love and pride. Kath is safe as a dinner lady but Martin's milk round isn't paying its way. As spring turns into summer, something's got to give.

Wells wrings more riches out of seemingly throwaway lines than a lot of writers manage in an entire play. Take Kath's comment that when
18-year-old Sophie lost her job after the closure of Woolworths three years previously her prospects looked bleak. It's a startling and refreshing bulletin from a place far removed from our frantic, London-centred dramatic world. Billy thinks he wants to go to art college in London but at 18 he's already warily wise. Maybe the milk round might do for him instead, as it has for his sister? After all, his fellow students will probably sport ripped jeans and "I'm not wearing ripped jeans. For anyone. Life's draughty enough".

Tamara Harvey directs her in-the-round production with palpable affection and coaxes terrific performances from all five actors. Palfrey's Kath is the benign, frazzled hub of the family, fond of her experiments with couscous and sushi but infuriated with the dodgy plumbing in the titular apparatus, attacking it with a hammer for occasional emphasis. Sampson pitches Billy's lovable gaucheness perfectly and Brotherhead is riveting as an emotionally reticent young woman on the brink of brave choices. Outstanding.

Until December 17 (020 8743 5050, bushtheatre.co.uk)

The Kitchen Sink
The Bush Theatre At The Old Library
Uxbridge Road, W12 8LJ

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