You can see playwright Jez Butterworth’s reverence for Pinter in the fractured dialogue and oddness of the story.

It’s done well, mind you, a homage from a skilled young writer who is making his own mark on the British theatre scene. While Parlour Song is set in a housing estate, the dilemmas facing the three characters are universal. They love and long to be loved, they feel trapped but have nowhere else to go, they are full of insecurities and doubts.

Ned and Joy are married and live in a mirror image semi-detached house with neighbours Dale and Lynn. Fortunately they get on well. Unfortunately Ned and Joy are both suffering personal crises.

Poor Ned thinks he’s losing his mind, as his property starts to go missing – nothing substantial but things keep disappearing even when under lock and key. He fears he is not able to satisfy his wife, the ironically named Joy. Another reviewer described her as looking and acting like Myra Hindley, I wish I’d thought of that line because it’s perfect.

Gavin Rutherford specialises in roles like Ned, big hearted men beaten down by life’s injustices, and again he makes you care for this poor guy.

Heather O’Carroll knows how to play women who on the surface are all hard angles, slowly melting them away to reveal someone complex and capable of intense feeling.

As the hale and hearty bling-wearing Dale, Christopher Brougham is delightful. Unlike his neighbours he’s an opportunist rather than a deeply tortured soul. He’s also our narrator.

Butterworth brings together all kinds of different theatre devices, from the naturalistic to the surreal, in this taut one hour 15 minute play.

It could have been a mess in less gifted hands and performed by less talented actors. This though is a little gem, nimbly directed by Susan Wilson. It is unsettling, and sad, and for both reasons it gets under your skin. The dark gauze set by John Hodgkins is cleverly multi-purpose and lit to perfection by Jennifer Lal.

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Three terrific performances in an excellent new English play, Parlour Song, are on display at Circa 2 in a delicate and nuanced production by Susan Wilson.

The advertising for the play might lead you to think that it’s a laugh-a-minute rip-roaring comedy. However, while there are some hilarious scenes, one is left at the end with a feeling of sharp unease, despite the playwright’s use of some overloaded symbols and an eternal triangle plot set in an all too recognizable suburbia of little boxes made out of ticky-tacky that all look the same.

This lower middle-class new built housing estate somewhere in England is no cosy enclave but a place where treasured sentimental possessions (cuff links and a bird bath for example) keep mysteriously disappearing, a huge rat is seen in the middle of a neighbour’s kitchen, and the parlour is apparently a place where the songs sung are sad and dreams die and ill-defined fears force their way to the surface.

Ned is a demolitions expert and is married to Joy, whose name belies her manner. He proudly shows numerous videos of his work to his long-suffering best friend and next-door neighbour Dale. Dale runs a car-wash business and is a cocky, nervy sort of bloke who takes on the role of Ned’s fitness coach (one of the funniest sequences in the play) as well as his wife’s lover when the disillusioned and bored Joy seduces him one summer’s night during a drought.

Christopher Brougham’s Dale has a springy, sporty air about him but his nervous energy hides his apprehensiveness which is revealed in his darting eyes and in his edgy manner of talking. Gavin Rutherford’s balding, overweight Ned is a masterly portrait of a man tormented by being in love with his wife of 11 years but unable to acknowledge to himself that she is no longer in love with him.

Joy is a bit of an enigma: she seems to have no job, career or even interests; the cooking appears to be done by Ned when he is at home, and they have no children. Heather O’Carroll manages to flesh her out so that when Joy daintily wipes her mouth with the corner of her napkin during dinner at the start of the play you know exactly her feelings for her husband, and her request for a lemon from Dale is equally revealing about her sexual desires.

All three actors are in wonderfully in tune with each other and the play as are Jennifer Lal’s haunting lighting, John Hodgkins’s simple stage design, Andrew Simpson’s AV design of Scrabble lettering, and Susan Wilson’s sensitive overall direction. 
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The title is strange for what the play turns out to be. Does it represent the way a song’s poetry, rhythm and tone can make the same old tale of loss and betrayal ring true enough to move you all over again, or is it the first of a number of ‘musical’ tricks that hide the play’s lack of depth? 

In a New York Times interview English playwright Jez Butterworth is quoted as saying, “The original genesis [sic] for this play was to take as simple a story as I possibly could lay my hands on and to try and tell it as truthfully as possible. I was listening to a lot of blues at the time, and Parlour Song is simply the story of a blues song. It’s ‘my baby’s going to leave me for my best friend, she’s taking all my money, and I’m going to kill her.’ It’s as simple as can be.”

But ‘parlour songs’ – i.e. round-the-piano sing-along fare, popular in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – tended to be folksy and sentimental; the sort of songs favoured by the Black & White Minstrel Shows of yore. Despite their roots being in African American spirituals and work songs, the term doesn’t exactly evoke “this sort of ‘letting in’ of a powerful spirit into your home”, as claimed by Butterworth in Circa’s programme note.

Another starting point, for this his sixth play, was to “stage something very much in the kind of environment I grew up in,” which was a ‘new-built’ estate at the edge of a town, with countryside beyond. In his play a forest of fir trees has given way to a plantation of identical or mirror-imaged houses.

Parlour Song is a series of scenes that dramatise a story being told to us directly by Dale (Chris Brougham), the next door neighbour of Ned (Gavin Rutherford) and Joy (Heather O’Carroll). Dale, who has gone from being unemployed to employing 30 men in a carwash franchise, and is married with children, links the scenes as narrator. “It started small,” is his opening line, whereupon we are treated to video footage of a city building being demolished.

Ned is a demolition engineer. He makes the calculations and presses the plunger. When he’s home with Joy, he cooks: roast chicken and vege followed by jam roly-poly; that sort of thing. Pinteresque domestic conversations ensue (Butterworth acknowledges Pinter as a big influence on his writing), wherein he tries to share his life with her and she responds monosyllabically, with cold politeness or with withering pedantry.

After 11 years of marriage they appear to be childless. Joy – who apparently does nothing by way of a job and has no occupational interests – is joyless (I wonder why) and an unnamed fear is gnawing at Ned and stopping him sleeping. Which came first, the frigidity or the fear, is anyone’s guess.

But instead of admitting to fear of infidelity, he preoccupies himself with the apparent disappearance of things. Cufflinks to start with, growing inexorably to the theft of the sandstone bird bath he bought Joy on their honeymoon, at which they have watched many pairs of birds meet, returning year after year.

Scrabble has developed an unusual significance as a harbinger of intimacy, and the projected ‘chapter headings’ in the 105 minute play (without interval) are spelt out in scrabble tiles.

Dale’s attempt to help by becoming Ned’s personal trainer either delays or encourages the onset of Ned’s paranoia and volatility (take your pick on that one too). Questions arise about his becoming a danger to himself and others, both in his marriage and his job, as the narrative builds towards the demolition of the local Arndale Centre.

Will his delusions create the very things he fears? As for Joy’s extraordinary fantasy, provoked by considering what she’d rather be eaten by … Her being able to separate fantasy from reality becomes as crucial as Ned’s needing to separate his work and home life, for fear of demolishing what he loves most. Not that his fear of infidelity – if that is what’s really eating him – is unfounded.

Objectively Parlour Song depicts, obliquely, three lives in a soulless suburb of outer London. Subjectively it offers us opportunities to invest its abstract elements – or do I mean fill its gaps? – with meaning according to our own experiences and observations. If you are into playing that game, or if you intuitively empathise with one or some of the characters, you may find it quite rewarding.

There is a structural climax in the final demolition and an emotional resolution redolent of Roger Hall’s Middle Age Spread. A surprising visual reveal in the penultimate moments tops a fine all black set by John Hodgkins and Jennifer Lal’s excellent lighting design.

Meanwhile there is much to appreciate in the three performances. Gavin Rutherford’s Ned, bald as a vacant lot or a cleared forest site but wanting to be hirsute, vacillates nicely from vulnerable to dangerous. Christopher Brougham’s cocky little Dale brings a dynamic energy to the production. Heather O’Carroll convincingly takes Joy from emotional unavailability to feeling reignited.

They all do the accents well, bringing a natural flow to Butterworth’s well crafted dialogue.

Once more stalwart Circa director Susan Wilson has recreated an interesting dish from the contemporary English theatre cuisine. But questions remain.  

Although I prefer the ‘get it’ moments to happen within a performance, I don’t mind being left with questions when the answers I find increase my appreciation of a play’s hitherto hidden qualities. But I haven’t yet worked out why is Dale the narrator. Is his version of what happened warped to justify his role in what happened, and if so should we come away with a sense of how it really was for the other two?

And for me, Parlour Song doesn’t work as a title for what I think the play wants to be.
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