Other Hands
Laura Wade has had one hell of a year. The Critics Circle Most Promising playwright, Pearson Best Play award winner and joint George Devine award winner, she has made her name as an excavator in the morbid – if dealing with death can be called morbid. As Wade has often pointed out, it’s more often to do with how we live life.
Colder Than Here and Breathing Corpses revealed Wade as a writer with a keen sense of the absurd. Other Hands now adds a further colour to the Wade palette. Less of a sleeping thriller than Corpses or direct contemplation of death as in Colder, it casts a sometimes tender, sometimes blanched eye over the current state of relationships.
To that extent it’s a small play, deeply domestic and circumscribed within a quartet of characters. Its observation, however, is scalpel acute. In Wade’s distillation of how the IT age affects us – rocketing stress levels, feelings of incompetence when machines fail and the sheer loneliness of the self-employed (we’re all homeworkers now) – you can feel the audience identifying with flakey Lydia whose only form of human contact seems to be when `pc doctor’, Steve comes to call. Steve’s smart-suited, obsessive and high-flying girlfriend Hayley, meanwhile, armed with all the latest Americanised Management Consultant jargonese, is setting about older Greg in an exercise that will `rationalise’ his firm’s working practises. Cue, rather too obviously, a bout of romantic musical chairs as Steve and Hayley – both suffering from similarly numbed relationships – wander into fresh fields and more comforting arms.
If this all sounds too schematic, it is. Nonetheless, there is something rather wonderful about a play that, in today’s world, re-awakens the idea of the under-estimated virtue of kindness, or `identifying a need’ as Lydia characteristically terms it, even if Katherine Parkinson‘s off-the-wall nerdiness pushes Lydia to unbelievability.
Other Hands lacks Wade’s previous bite but it remains strangely affecting – and not only because the cast includes the luminous Anna Maxwell Martin, fresh from inducing a national love affair as the saintly Esther in the BBC’s Bleak House. Bijan Sheibani‘s production adds Pinter-esque edginess to Wade’s fragmenting dialogue and there’s terrific back-up from Richard Harrington as Steve and Michael Gould as Greg.
A slight divertissement that will surprise you by how much it touches you – look out for Hayley and Greg’s restaurant seduction scene – derivative but brilliantly indicative of the push-me-pull-you of sexual diversions.
– Carole Woddis
