Prior to their demise, thanks to the success of what (for brevity) I will call "records", parlour songs were a common entertainment enjoyed by many in the front room of their Victorian homes.
Sheet music was widely available, and, amongst the classes who could afford some leisure time and a musical instrument, singing these folksy, often sentimental songs was a very popular pastime.
It's not necessary to know any of this prior to seeing Jez Butterworth's 2008 Parlour Song, but this story of unvoiced heartbreak could be the melancholic echo of a parlour ballad, not sung in this case, but narrated by Dale, the neighbour of married couple, Ned and Joy.
Their homes are just six feet apart, on an indistinguishable estate of identikit houses as ubiquitous today as terraces of Victorian two-up, two-downs once were. Theirs is a life of routine and comfortable contentment. Successful demolition expert Ned is frequently away from home blowing things up, whilst underwritten Joy remains at home with too much time on her hands; Dale has done ok, risen from more modest beginnings to now be the owner of three carwash operations.
Butterworth takes us behind the façade of homogenised domesticity (another terrific set from designer Emily Bestow) to watch Ned slowly crumbling; in demolition parlance, he is the drop-zone where the damage happens, the wider fallout landing in the predicted debris area, a surrounding ring itself encircled by a further safety zone occupied by the spectators.
The play is both an examination of a marriage being allowed to fail and a satire of a certain kind of suburban life, each made somewhat more interesting by the character of Dale.
For the one part, this friendly neighbour is a facilitator who sets the context as much as the furniture for the next episode in this tragicomedy, and on the other, he is a toothless wolf-in-sheep's-clothing. Dale, with the sincerity of a rubbernecker, is deceiving Ned and Joy as much as they are each other, his interventions ineffectual against either Ned's or Joy's otherwise inevitable trajectory.
Naveed Khan's pathetically needy Ned evokes some sympathy but remains as infuriating as Kellie Shirley's tautly restless Joy, unhappily caught in the downpour of wreckage from Ned's undoing. Under the direction of James Haddrell, their suffering is palpable at times, but if ever there were a pair that needed their heads knocking together...
The extremely likeable performance from Jeremy Edwards as Dale nonetheless makes for a hattrick of dislikable characters from Butterworth, and the deliberately inconclusive ending only serves to uptick the disinterest. This Parlour Song does not have a memorable tune.