ADC
Tuesday 21st to Saturday 25th October
Dir: Veronica Bennett & Joe Hytner; CUADC

Five Stars

Gosh this was good: pacy, scary, and funny. This wasn't what I expected, or wanted, to think: I found director Joe Hytner’s Musings On Pinter in last week’s Varsity enraging. The claim that “there’s no need to intellectualise” modern things that we might find complicated really irritates me: as though intellectualising them somehow diminishes how much we’ll enjoy them. Any imperative to “submit to its mystery and complexity” sounds, quite frankly, like a liaison in a Hampstead Heath loo.
But The Hothouse was fabulous precisely because it achieved this synthesis. It raised questions about notions of bureaucracy, human relations, what it means to be in the hierarchies upon which we build our whole society. Who’s in charge? The man (James Moran, brilliantly po-faced) who can tell his lover he’s not in the mood? Or the woman (the smouldering Heather Simons) who has all the men wrapped around her provocative little finger?
These are important questions, and the audience is forced to engage with them, otherwise the whole play falls apart. It becomes too remote through its anonymous location and eerily numbered patients and surnamed staff. The horrific psychological abuse meted upon Lamb becomes too purposeless; the play meanders into gratuitousness.
But at the same time it’s funny - bloody funny. There is an element of really quite disturbing laughter in the dark here: Harry Adamson’s Roote is quite clearly totally unhinged, subject to memory lapses and fits of shouting and crying. In terms of time onstage he’s the play’s protagonist, and it’s to his credit that the audience continues to discover newer, scarier depths to him. Similarly, Alex Winterbotham nearly steals the show as the catty, homicidal Lush; he is only usurped by a performance of staggering assurance and deadpan comic timing from Moran as Gibbs.
I could go on. This was brilliant: chock-full of suppressed violence and anger, exuding the blackest black comedy. It’s sexy - see Simons smouldering, above - and it perpetually keeps the audience on its toes, thinking. I’m not giving it six stars, out of protest against simply ridiculous system, but if you’re given to ludicrous hyperbole then get out your biro and colour that last one in. It is one of the best you’ll see at Cambridge, and everyone involved deserves boundless praise. Even Joe Hytner. He and co-director Veronica Bennett have created something special.

George Reynolds