Review: The Clean House

Apr 18 2008 by Abbie Wightwick, Western Mail

New Theatre, Cardiff

HOUSEWORK is bad for you, laughing is good.

It’s an obvious message but one all too often forgotten especially mid-week when we are firmly strung to the domestic wheel.

Going to the theatre and watching a play that makes you laugh out loud as well as easing the guilt about the pile of laundry at home is even better.

Sarah Ruhl’s play, The Clean House, will appeal to the whole spectrum of views on cleaning – from the obsessive manic compulsive duster to the slattern hurling cushions asunder.

The play grovels around in the laundry basket of its characters examining what makes us tick through attitudes to cleanliness.

Lane, the immaculate, white-suited doctor, played magnificently by Patricia Hodge, wants someone else to make her house spick and span.

Everyone can sympathise with her lament that she doesn’t want to get to know her maid, just for her to clean. But nobody can like Lane for her obsessive control and hygiene, which may be one reason her surgeon husband runs off with a messy, cancer-ridden patient.

But where does the humour come in?

Lane’s cleaner Portuguese maid Matilde, is the daughter of comedians (now dead), searching for the perfect joke. Matilde, played by Natalia Tena, becomes depressed by cleaning and is helped out by Lane’s depressed sister Virgina (Joanna McCallum). who believes cleaning lifts her mood. She soon realises she’s wrong, messes up her cleaning and starts on a quest for more rewarding work.

Natalia Tena’s deadpan delivery and the exchanges on the pros and cons of domesticity with McCallum were laugh-out-loud funny. Perhaps only women were cackling when McCallum’s character announced some women buy new underwear and others “just scrub and scrub” after they menstruate, but I heard even a few men snorting.

There is a dark side to the play. The first act races along in a light, comedy. The second becomes blacker as Lane discovers her husband Charles’s affair. His mistress Ana dies as Charles battles for a cure miles away in the Antarctic.

Eleanor Bron as Ana and Oliver Cotton as husband Charles provide the comedy as well as the tragedy of death and lost love.

Ana eventually succumbs when told the perfect joke by Matilde, which I assume means that death is the funniest and final jest in life.

I might not be right, but it was a very good play and I even ignored the ironing when I got home.

4 out of 5

The show runs until tomorrow. The box office number is 029 2087 8889