Owners, Caryl Churchill’s first professionally produced stage play, premièred at the Royal Court Theatre in 1972, though she had successfully written for radio and had had student productions of earlier work. It was a response to the then current housing situation and property market and, half a century later, is still regrettably very relevant with the situation in some ways even worse.
Cat Fuller’s setting for Stella Powell-Jones’s production is a row of blue front doors, not only a parade of property but a hint that we could be in for farce, but the opening and closing of doors here marks location rather than comical timing and, though there is some broad humour, it isn’t easy to find the subject hilarious and it lacks the sharpness of satire.
It opens in Clegg the butcher’s, where Mr Clegg is closing down, being put out of business by the setting up of a supermarket next door. Mark Hackett’s Clegg is full of both bluster and resentment: resentment that he doesn’t have a son and heir and that his wife Marion overshadows him. He wants a wife of the old fashioned kind, subservient to him. Instead, Marion is bossily successful as a property developer. Clegg keeps thinking up ways to gain the upper hand by killing her.
Laura Doddington makes Marion wonderfully common and confident. She has a sidekick employee, and possibly lover, called Worsely (Tom Morley), who has a suicide complex. He wants to kill himself but is not very good at it. A succession of attempts result in a succession of injuries and, when he calls on the Samaritans for help, instead of assist him in dying, they want to stop him.
Marion sends Worsely to talk the tenants of one of her houses into moving, beginning with an offer of £200 to get out. They are Alec—Ryan Donaldson makes him either very laid-back or heavily on antidepressants—his pregnant wife Lisa (Boadicea Ricketts), their children and Alec’s aged mother (Pearl Marsland) who is on her last legs. There is a complication that, in the past, the couple were friends of the Cleggs, Alec Marion’s lover and Clegg fancying Lisa, though at first they think their landlady is a Mrs Crow.
That is only the beginning: it isn’t only houses that Marion wants to be hers, there’s Lisa’s new baby, and Alec perhaps too. How much do we own of our own lives? How many ways are we exploited? Apart from a brief appearance from what I took to be a social worker (Laura Woodhouse) who has a posh voice, these are people all of the same class; it is all about personal gain, political principles don’t get a mention.
Churchill went on to write some great plays; this isn’t one of them, but, though its characters go on a bit, it gets some full-blooded playing that provides entertainment if it lacks real bite.