A cleaner in search of a perfect joke

Mar 22 2008 by Karen Price, Western Mail

THE brand new award-winning comedy The Clean House will be staging its Welsh premiere next month.

Starring Patricia Hodge, pictured right, and Eleanor Bron, it will visit the New Theatre in Cardiff before its run in the West End.

It tells the story of Lane (Hodge), the woman who has everything – a successful surgeon for a husband and her own busy career as a doctor. Everything, that is, except the one thing she really wants – a clean house.

Unfortunately, Mathilde, their young cleaner from Brazil, hates to clean. Instead she prefers to dream up the perfect joke.

But Lane’s sister Virginia loves to clean and comes to a secret arrangement with Mathilde behind Lane’s back.

Meanwhile, Lane’s husband Charles (Oliver Cotton) becomes enchanted with one of his patients, the free-spirited Ana (Bron) who casts a wonderfully surreal spell over The Clean House.

Hodge is best known for her numerous television credits, including Rumpole of the Bailey and Jemima Shore Investigates. Most recently she has been on stage in His Dark Materials at the National Theatre and Boeing-Boeing and The Country Wife in the West End.

Bron’s extensive career includes recent appearances in film in Wimbledon and The House of Mirth and on stage in All About My Mother at the Old Vic.

Cotton has enjoyed numerous seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre and most recently he was in Philadelphia Story at the Old Vic.

The Clean House is written by Sarah Ruhl who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for this poignant comedy, which has won huge critical acclaim in America.

The Clean House is at the New Theatre, Cardiff, from April 15 to 19. Tickets range from £7.50 to £26 and can be booked from the box office on 029 2087 8889 or online at www.newtheatrecardiff.co.uk

Karen Price