Like the title itself, ‘Home, I’m Darling’, this clever, refreshing play upturns ideals and perceptions from the very start. There is no curtain; the audience arrives in the auditorium and is presented with an idealistic nineteen-fifties home set – with florid wallpaper, a home cocktail bar, ‘vintage’ furniture and fittings and a classic pristine kitchen, with a very shiny tap. It is magazine perfect, with not an object out of place and presents as a perfect show home. The audience is given plenty of time to let nostalgia soak in and indulge in fantasies of a cosy ordered lifestyle, uncomplicated by the modern world, where Doris Day and Gregory Peck kiss each other on the cheek and co-habit in marital bliss, each playing their gender defined roles. Yet, the audience is very soon and rather amusingly shaken out of this comfort zone – all is not what it seems.

Judy (Jessica Ransom) arrives on stage immaculately presented as you would expect for a fifties housewife; hair curled and set, make up, full frock, petticoats, tramline stockings and heels, to serve her husband Johnny (Neil Mcdermott) his breakfast. They joke about how happy they are, that they have the perfect relationship and love, before he puts on his hat, picks up his briefcase and happily trots off to work. Judy is left to her day of cleaning, ordering and perfecting the role of Domestic Goddess. Through some artful anachronistic clues and playful dialogues, we begin to see that Judy’s lifestyle is not exactly what it appears to be.

The rest of the cast, Sylvia, Judy’s mother, played delightfully by Diane Keen, the couples dancing friends Fran (Cassie Bradley) and Marcus (Matthew Douglas), and Johnny’s boss Alex (Shanez Pattni), expose the flaws in Judy’s values and blissfully ignorant lifestyle choice. Although you may initially be led to believe that this play is a celebration of a bygone era, the characters and plot cleverly demonstrate that it certainly wasn’t that perfect for others; blacks, homosexuals weren’t exactly living the dream for example, as Alex dryly points out while being offered cocktails and devilled eggs.  Sylvia, the divorced and honest speaking mother, shows us that the fifties was a time when misogyny was rife, which would take years of protest, sacrifice and fight to finally gain women’s rights and liberation from subservience and sexual abuse.

What makes the play so rich and absorbing is the delightful use of Shakespearean themes; order/disorder/change, appearance versus reality, and the conflict arising from individual ideals versus the expectations of conforming to society’s norms and values. I went in expecting a bit of a feminist battle in a ‘Stepford Wives’ or ‘I Love Lucy’ sort of way, but this play is so far from that; it challenges the audience’s views on so many levels and in unexpected directions.

Written by Laura Wade, the play is relatively new to the scene and was first performed at the Theatr Clwyd in 2018, before running at the National Theatre and transferring to the West End, winning the 2019 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. It is now on tour, providing an original, light and breezy yet meaty piece of theatre to audiences around the country. I foresee longevity in this play, and daresay it will become a modern classic, as it’s themes and ideas, lively script and endearing characters are thought-provoking yet thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining.

‘Home, I’m Darling’ is playing at the New Victoria Theatre, Woking from 21-25th March, 2023.

[Amanda Briggs, March 2023]