Review by Sam Waite
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Sometimes having someone to support you through thick and thin can make all the difference – the problem is, sometimes what you need support to get through is something you’ve tried so hard to hide that you can’t let that one person in. In Sarah Power’s play Grud, now playing in Hampstead Theatre’s downstairs space, a teenager makes her first real friend, while trying desperately to keep the situation at home under wraps.
Bo meets Aicha, the only consistent member of their college’s “Space Club” when checking out the different groups and activities she could partake in and is quickly charmed by Aicha’s off-kilter humour and proud nerdiness. While the two girls grow closer by working on a project led by an unseen PHD student, and their affectionately-treated model of the final creation, the friendship is tested by Bo’s mysterious home life. Her father, nicknamed Grud as his “monster name” in her childhood, is less than consistent in attending work, often faces complaints when he does go, and has a serious issue with alcohol.
Noemi Daboczi’s design finds the stage much higher on the left (from the audience’s view) than the right, with a steep slope separating the two areas. At first the action takes place in these two divided spaces, Bo and Grud’s home and the classroom reserved for the Space Club. As the truth becomes harder to hide, and as Bo feels the struggle of her overlapping worlds, the divide becomes less clear, with her no longer the only one to cross the space. The visual symbols of this struggle are effective, but do mean that certain moments where two characters sharing the stage aren’t in the same building don’t have the same impact – the boundaries have been broken down, so who is in which place isn’t as immediately apparent.
Power’s script is striking in its realism – where fun-loving, friend-lacking Aicha is deliberately performative in how she speaks and behaves, the scenes between Bo and Grud are deeply naturalistic. Grud’s disjointed, confused dialogue is upsettingly life-like, as are Bo’s continued attempts at calmness and gentle nudging him towards the better choice. The pace is also solid, well-handled by director Jaz Woodcock-Stewart, and the agonising quality of Grud’s darker moments is allowed to linger just long enough to create discomfort, but not so long that it becomes oppressive. In the instances where a third location, the local canal, is needed, Daboczi’s set has a lift-away section revealing a deep gap within the stage – Woodcock-Stewart doesn’t overuse this hidden touch, keeping the wonderment of its reveals intact.
Karl Theobald, as the alcohol-dependant father, is frighteningly good in the role. He stumbles about the stage, introducing an unspoken but all-too-real concern that he may fall down the slope at its centre, slurring his words and stumbling over sentences, entirely convincing in having drowned the day in his drink. When the character is sober, or at least less noticeably drunk, Theobald is charming and personable, a proper lad who never quite grew up, who loves a bit of Master Chef and radiates with affection for his daughter.
Bo, Catherine Ashdown, is blunt and quick to annoyance, but Ashdown gives her a friendly, child-like quality. Maintaining a carefully controlled blankness to her tone and expression, when Bo sinks into fear and upset in the later scenes she is visibly and palpably terrified. Kadeisha Belgrave is hilarious and heart-warming as Aicha, cracking jokes and brining just the right amount of quirkiness to the lines. Still, her performance, far deeper in scenes where the truth begins to rear its ugly head, can’t quite erase how superfluous the character seems for much of the first hour or so. Before the two worlds begin to intertwine more noticeably, the scenes between Aicha and Bo seem only to delay the development of the home-life scenes.
Struggling in places but magnificent in others, Grud rings up difficult and important subjects, but can feed meandering and sluggish in reaching these topics in its early scenes. Still, the talented cast and well-honed characters are a joy to watch, and the slice-of-life quality of those first scenes is not unwelcome, just slightly at odds with the overall tone. Grud may have its shortcomings, but the charm of its protagonists and cutting relevance of its plot are impossible to deny.
Grud plays at Hampstead Theatre until August 3rd
For tickets and information visit https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2024/grud/
Photos by Alex Brenner
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