Back in 2015, director Tricia Thorns and Two’s Company mounted a beautiful staging of Michael Hastings's previously unproduced 1973 play The Cutting of the Cloth, which centred on a Jewish teenager starting as a tailor’s apprentice. Don’t Destroy Me, his first play, which premièred at the New Lindsey Theatre in Notting Hill in 1956 when he was just 18, is about a 15-year-old in the same situation but at home, not the workplace.
Both plays draw on Hasting’s own life experience at that age, and, though this one is not so accomplished, it is a remarkable and intriguing creation; some of its characters too weird to have been invented, you feel they have to be based on real observation. It is their eccentricities that others would notice, so that is what we see on the surface, and the teenage Hastings is less successful in digging beneath the surface, though it is clear that war and fleeing from Fascism have caused disruption in all their lives. This isn’t a play about faith, but they have all been affected by what has happened to Europe’s Jews.
Fifteen-year-old Sammy, whose mother died in giving him birth, his father Leo Korz and stepmother Shani are Hungarian refugees. When they arrived in England, his parents were struggling, so Sammy was raised by an aunt in Croydon. Now, on the eve of starting his first job, he is joining them in their rented rooms in Brixton. Contact between them has been sporadic, Leo and Sammy are on quite different wavelengths, communication is a problem.
Shani, much younger than Leo whom she only married to get out of Hungary, tries to be welcoming, but it's a divided household. Bored and lazy, Shani is having a loveless affair with George, the wide-boy bookie in the room across the landing, while Leo escapes the situation by going for “walks”—round to the pub, where he drinks too much.
Upstairs lives Mrs Pond, almost certainly not the widow she claims to be but a fantasist who has had a succession of “boyfriends”, and her daughter Suki, who feuds with her mother and dreams of being a glamorous celebrity, her posturing proving an attraction to Sammy.
Blowing in like fresh air from the real world is landlady Mrs Miller, chasing Mrs Pond for the rent and befriending everyone. They are all Jewish except George, and to please Sammy, whose aunt has brought him up to be religiously observant, Shani arranges a visit from a rabbi.
Almost every scene seems to end in a row and the cast amply convey their characters' pent-up frustrations: Paul Ryder’s Leo, trapped in a world he doesn’t fit into; Nathalie Barclay’s Shani snatching promiscuous excitement; Alix Dunmore’s Mrs Pond reaching breaking point and Nell Williams as her daughter seems likely to grow up too like her mother.
Nicholas Day makes a bemused rabbi, gentle but out of his depth, and Timothy O’Hara a bit of a bully as opportunist spiv George, while, though Mrs Miller may be a stock salt-of-the-earth character, Sue Kelvin makes her delightfully warm and amusing.
As Sammy, Eddie Boyce is making his professional stage debut and delivering a touching performance, whether being fresh-faced and hopeful, hunched on the floor trapped in his situation or snatching a precious jazz record from the hands of his father.
Tricia Thorns encourages her cast to give full rein to their characters. The scenes may be as fragmented as the lives they present, but they have great vitality, not least in setting up things ready for the rabbi’s arrival which becomes a helter-skelter ballet of action deftly done at great speed matched by klezmer music. It is a joyous idea of how life could be instead of the disappointments they live with, but like the loaned teacups and chairs, it is only briefly borrowed.
Like 19-year-old Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey a couple of years later, Don’t Destroy Me showed a remarkable teenage talent. Hastings matured into a dramatist well worth revisiting.