Hippie haven

A mad leap into the dark on the South Bank. And I’m all for mad leaps into the dark. A big-name cast has been assembled for a new play by an untested writer at the 900-seater Lyttelton theatre. Cripes. Stephen Beresford is a Rada graduate who knows his way around the dramatic repertoire. And he seems to have approached his first commission from the National in a spirit of dazzling insouciance. ‘Hey, I’ll just nick everything from Chekhov: the plot, the setting, the characters, the relationships and the atmosphere. And no one’ll notice!’ Well, there are smarter ways to go poaching. If you steal from a lesser dramatist, you can improve what you’ve stolen. But if you mug a genius, his genius will embarrass you.

The location is a ramshackle seaside house in Devon where Judy Haussman, a drugged-up old hippie, lives with her spiky daughter, Libby, and her even spikier grand-daughter, Summer. A set of doomed Chekhovian romances begins. Judy’s son, Nick, returns from rehab and falls in love with Judy’s pool-boy. The pool-boy is obsessed with Libby who is busy dallying with the local doctor who amuses himself by flirting with the sex-starved Judy.

So, nothing a quick orgy wouldn’t sort out. But there’s another factor at work. The big old house. Nick and Libby are scheming to nab the property from Judy but neither character seems to understand the concept of legal title. The writer certainly doesn’t. If Judy owns it, Judy disposes of it. End of story. But in the second act we learn that the house has been sold to a mortgage company without Judy’s knowledge. No idea how that could happen.