It’s just over a decade since the second world war ended but its legacy of trauma is still very present for the troubled Jewish characters of Michael Hastings’ strikingly restless debut play.
Hastings was only 18 when Don’t Destroy Me premiered in 1956, informed by his own fractured family history. He had escaped an unhappy home: his teenage hero Sammy (a splendid professional debut by Eddie Boyce) stumbles into one. Born in Hungary but raised in suburban Britain, Sammy arrives at a south London lodging house to rejoin his father and stepmother. He’s ready for a city life as vibrant and questing as his cherished jazz records. That doesn’t happen.
Sammy’s father Leo (Paul Rider) is all drink and reproach; his stepmother (Nathalie Barclay) is sleeping with the bookie next door. A delusional neighbour (Alix Dunmore) alternately smothers and ignores her daughter Suki (Nell Williams). All these Jewish adults carry wartime losses; they haven’t managed to rebuild themselves in peacetime London. Both Sammy and Suki are children raised in damage.
Tom and Viv (1984), Hastings’ best-known play, was about TS Eliot’s first marriage, also sunk by mental illness and the cruel inability to connect. In this earlier work, everyone suffers – a visiting rabbi (Nicholas Day) blinks helplessly at the fractious misery around the tea table. On Alex Marker’s set, a skeletal door plays up the lack of privacy, but when Leo lifts the window to the street outside, it’s only to wish he might hurl himself out.
Hastings writes with a querulous vitality. Conversations are more like collisions between the self-involved characters. Everything is fractured: there’s intrusion rather than empathy, attempts at candour quickly become confusion, all is abrupt interruption. Even Sammy’s gramophone only ever plays for a few seconds before someone lunges to switch it off.
The play’s jangling dynamics never settle, but this is a smart rediscovery by Two’s Company director Tricia Thorns and her nervily responsive cast. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which premiered three months before Don’t Destroy Me, also gazes balefully at Britain from claustrophobic rented rooms. While Osborne portrayed a post-imperial nation coasting to irrelevance, for Hastings’ immigrant characters history is all too current.
• At the Arcola, London, until 3 February
