Ben Ockrent’s Relics had me hooked from the moment the safety curtain started rising: a metal number with a banner of packing tape marked FRAGILE on it. As it rose, the teddy bear that had been lying in front of it was silhouetted, hanging from it by one arm.
It’s not just a cute opener. Director Michael Longhurst and his designer, Joanna Scotcher, are projecting the core of the piece with minimum means. Things in this house are fragile. And when nerdy Rob (Sam Swainsbury, pictured bottom) appears, this mini-prelude is rounded out as he silently and warily, like a kid doing something naughty, tests out the hospital bed in the centre of the room, using its remote control with a delighted smile to raise and lower its two ends. It’s a subtle, hilarious dumb show. But the idyll doesn’t last: he accidentally raises and locks the side rail and has to battle to get out before the rest of his family arrive. Perhaps it isn’t just the teddy bear hanging on by just one limb.
Rob is one of four siblings who have gathered to divvy up the remains of their late mother’s estate. The oldest, Olivia (Sally Phillips, pictured below) – known as Liv on some occasions, Ollie on others, suggesting her role in the family may be more mutable than it seems – has quit her job and moved back to care for their ailing mother. A children’s book writer, she is highly intelligent and articulate but also wounded, crying as she moves the hospital bed aside. Her siblings’ failure to visit their dying mother wounds her the most.
Rob has been busy tending to his son, Gabe, who is autistic; Shelly, short for Michelle (Charly Clive) is a seemingly ditsy inner-city primary school teacher with an absent girlfriend, Kelly; Jonny (JJ Feild, pictured below right) is a louche cosmopolitan who travels widely and doesn’t believe children are obligated to look after their mother. Now Olivia – like all first-born children, “wise but also controlling and bossy”, according to Shelly, who has studied the subject – is taking charge. She wants them to agree on legal measures to protect the tree under which Uncle Harry’s ashes are buried, should the house’s new owners try to remove it; and she has drawn up rules about how the estate should be divided up.
The title’s implications soon resonate: the people gathering to lay claim to Mum’s relics are themselves the leftovers of a former life, one of teddy bears and larking about to favourite pop songs, a time before their parents’ marriage ran into difficulties. It’s a scenario all who have wrangled over an inheritance will recognise, many painfully. The temperature starts to rise when the siblings suggest the items they would like to take away.
It becomes clear that Jonny, who has surprised them all by being there at all, has been at the house for a couple of days and, even more surprisingly, wants the painting in mum’s bedroom, a lugubrious view of a church he has always called “weird”. Led by the astute Olivia, the other siblings turn sleuth, quickly establishing that Jonny must think the artwork is valuable.
This familiar family tension now pivots into an even more thorny struggle, between Rob and Shelly’s significant need for cash (Jonny admits he is simply “greedy”) and their principles. Olivia has already decreed no items can be chosen for financial gain; worse, there is a possibility that Grandpa, who bought the paintings in Europe in 1945, has blundered into a cache of Nazi spoils stolen from Jewish families. Olivia has never wanted to sell, but now her very legitimacy as a veto-wielder is being questioned, even though she is the executor of the estate and technically sole beneficiary.
Thus far, the characters have tried to be on their best behaviour. Their banter is sharp and witty, their treatment of each other mostly good-natured though veering off into deep-rooted childish sulks. But when an irate Jonny does something very spiteful to Olivia, the gloves come off, and the sparring turns ferociously physical. And comically so. Longhurst turns these fisticuffs into a slo-mo brawl, where each move is made funnier by being visible longer. Phillips, in particular, is an impressive scrapper. She’s also an estimable straight actor, moving and sympathetic as she tries to keep the family’s integrity afloat.
This is a beautifully realised production, full of comic details, delicate characterisation and OTT set pieces. Shelly's attempt at nibbles in a underprovisioned house is a great sight gag, but also an insight into her sad desire to please. Phillips trying to pack a box of books is up there with Swainsbury’s opening dumb-show for precise observation and perfect execution as she struggles to find the beginning of the tape while trying to deliver her plea for the tree to be protected. And there's a telling scene where she and Rob pitch in as Shelly lip-synchs to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, a large spoon her microphone. The unison hand-moves the three do, dredged up from their muscle memory, are a sign of the unified front they once presented – and may still achieve?
The resolution of the play jars slightly. Ockrent has set up an insoluble, intractable problem and then, presto!, goes and solves it in a couple of lines of dialogue. But overall the drama works, faultlessly acted and plotted as the family’s secrets and longings begin to leak out like that old bear’s stuffing.
- Relics at the Lyric Hammersmith until 18 July
- More theatre reviews on theartsdesk
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