If only Caryl Churchill’s plays were as thrillingly macabre as her debut

The first play by the pioneering feminist Caryl Churchill has been revived at the Jermyn Street Theatre. Owners, originally staged in 1972, feels very different from Churchill’s later work and it recalls the apprentice efforts of Brecht who started out writing middle-class comedies tinged with satirical anger.

Churchill sets her play in the cut-throat London property market where prices are soaring and tenants are apt to be evicted if they can’t cover sudden rent rises. Marion is an estate agent who secretly buys a house occupied by her former lover Alec who is married to Lisa. Their third child is on the way. Marion hatches an evil plan to kick the family out and to claim Alec back as they sink into financial ruin. A secondary plot develops when Marion attempts to adopt Lisa’s new baby so that she can pass it on to her husband, Clegg, a psychotic butcher who longs for a son to inherit his business. This baffling and over-complex narrative is very carefully paced and the bizarre elements are set out in manageable pieces so that everything makes sense.

Offbeat comedy lubricates the moving parts. Marion employs a hopeless geek, Worsley, who longs to kill himself but keeps getting it wrong. He slashes his wrists and survives. He takes overdoses of pills without result. His many attempts to gas himself come to nothing. He spots an advert for the Samaritans and, misunderstanding the nature of their mission, asks them to send an adviser to facilitate his suicide. The mood of the piece is cruel, amoral and thrillingly macabre. Clegg, for example, plots to murder Marion by shooting her in the head or by starting a fire that may kill Alec, Lisa and their babies.