Visually world-class, dramatically second-rate: Don’t Destroy Me, at the Arcola, reviewed

Don’t Destroy Me is the rather breathless title of Michael Hastings’s first play which he wrote when he was just 18. The material draws on his adolescent years in a south London boarding house and the action opens with an elderly husband, Leo, and his unfaithful young wife, Shani, preparing for a visit from their handsome teenage son, Sammy. Leo knows that his marriage is being undermined by Shani’s affair with a cocky spiv who lives next door but this tawdry business fades into the background as the play starts to come alive.

The characters upstairs take over. The flat above is occupied by Mrs Pond, a pretentious fraud in her early forties who is desperate for romance and attention. She earns money by reading tea leaves and she claims to have a husband, Jack, and a white rabbit living with her. Neither have ever been seen, possibly because they don’t exist.