Stars explained: * A production of no real merit with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic which lifts theatre to another plane.
Half stars fall between the ratings

home couple

Jonathan Blake as Johnny and Katie Ho as Judy in their never had it so good world. Pictures: Alastair Barnsley

Home, I’m Darling

Highbury Theatre Centre

*****

Judy and Johnny are a perfect poster couple for the 1950s as they enjoy the perfect breakfast she has prepared for her perfect husband before he sets off to his perfect job as an estate agent after a perfect kiss and smile leaving her free to spend her day as the perfect housewife looking after their perfect home, cooking, washing and cleaning, even having time to clean behind . . . and under everything.

It is a perfect relationship. Perfect, except for one small, but important fact, outside their front door is not the Britain of rationing, of bomb sites, of never having had it so good, but the 2020s, their front door has become a sort of wormhole between now and then.

It all started when Judy, a high powered financial executive, took redundancy in a restructuring exercise and after a chat with husband Johnny, with their finances worked out on the back of an envelope, decided to be a stay at home housewife, like it used to be in the old days... .

Perhaps at this point we should mention she had an obsession with all things 1950s from appliances – they had a period fridge that only worked when it felt like it – to décor, music to clothes.

Johnny appeared to share the obsession, but, perhaps he was misleading us, after he is an estate agent remember, and he didn’t so much believe in the 1950’s lifestyle as indulge his wife’s passion in it.

The, should we call it an . . . experiment, was to be fun and was to last six months and here we are, joining them some three years later.

Katie Ho is superb as Judy, staunchly defending and extolling a time she never lived in, except seventy years later of course, a time she had never experienced. Any questioning was seen as a personal affront with her mood as changeable as summer weather. A lovely performance.

 

fran and marcus

Judy with Alex Hunter as Fran and Elliot Beech as Marcus with Johnny upstairs

Jonathan Blake, in his first appearance at Highbury, gives us a Johnny whose life is a permanent dilemma, living at home in a world of 70 years ago, and heading off to work in the present dressed like a 1950’s office clerk, complete with trilby, driving an Austin car old enough to have a number plate in Latin.

It is a convincing performance as Johnny negotiates the two sides of his conflicted life, his undoubted love for his wife, supporting or at least going along with her obsession, yet at the same time being uneasy about how it lies with his job in the real world. A situation not helped as his sales and associated commission declines leaving their envelope finances . . . questionable.

The two worlds collide quite disastrously when Judy persuades him to invite his new boss Alex round for cocktails (it’s a 50’s thing before you ask) and nibbles, with Judy in 50’s party dress, complete with fur stoal, and Alex arriving casual, as she was told it would be.

With Judy trying to impress (“Cheese Straw, Devilled Egg, anyone“) Alex is constantly on her phone with a big deal being negotiated, leaderboards and targets were not a 50’s feature but certainly feature for Sharon Sprason’s Alex, who, incidentally, it turns out is the 1950’s, or maybe it is the 2020’s, who knows, love interest, sort of, even if she didn’t know it.

judy and mum

Julie Hayes as mum, Sylvia with daughter Judy

Judy’s best friend is Fran, who if we are honest sees 1950 as more ten to eight than anything else, and sees cooking and cleaning beyond cursory tidying as beyond her, openly admitting the longest recipe she has followed that week is “Pierce film lid”.

Alex Hunter gives us a Fran who is . . . well normal. She’s a stylist, loves her job, and is fascinated by Judy’s lifestyle, even borrowing a 1949 book on household tips, but being fascinated and wanting to follow are . . . well some 70 years apart.

She is married to Marcus, who, is a touch creepy in the hands of Elliot Beech, the hands having a tendency to wander it seems after certain 2020’s allegations are made by Marcus’s secretary about his rather more 1950’s style approach to female staff – a throwback to the days when women in the workplace were seen as fair game for less principled male colleagues.

Whether the allegations are found to be true or not we never discover but while he is suspended pending investigation and is talking to Judy about her working for him on a freelance basis, discussing what she is prepared to do for her fee . . . let’s just say his defence to the charges becomes less convincing. Judy’s world is beginning to crumble.

The two couples have been going to JiveFest for the past two years, a weekend of 1950’s nostalgia but this year Fran and Marcus can’t go . . . punching another hole in Judy’s idyllic world, or fantasy depending upon your viewpoint.

It is certainly a fantasy in the eyes of Sylvia, Judy’s mum in a real no nonsense performance from Julie Hayes. Sylvia is a lifelong women’s libber who brought her daughter up in a Brighton commune. She has reluctantly gone along with her daughter’s lifestyle but Marcus and his suspension are a catalyst to breach the dam and she lets fly on her daughter’s obsession with a time she never lived through, a time where the likes of Marcus were the least of the worries for a woman in the workplace. She told it like it was even down to the real reason she and her husband, the father Judy had put on a pedestal, had parted. It was a lot more sordid than the saintly life Judy had assigned to him.

Judy’s world was now starting to nosedive, and when Johnny’s not so much hoped for but desperately financially needed promotion didn’t materialise, rock bottom was in sight. Banks have this strange obsession of wanting mortgages on 1950’s style homes to be paid with 21st century style cash, preferably every month. Something had to change, but what? Answers come at the price of a ticket.

Essentially it is a thinking man’s comedy, or as we are now in 2025 rather than 1950 we had better say a thinking person’s comedy. There is plenty to laugh at in the clash of the two worlds; Judy decanting 21st century shopping into 1950’s authentic bags and boxes; a fridge that is “a cupboard with a light”; a 1950’s TV converted to a (modern) DVD player to show 1950’s films; no mobile phones . . . but a laptop in a drawer which is needed to buy authentic vintage 1940’s and 1950’s items or spare parts for their ancient Austin car on eBay or on-line.

It is a strange situation. We have a wife in a high powered job, leading a team, a position that could be seen as female empowerment, or at the very least a level of sexual equality, giving it up to become the little woman, the dutiful wife seeing to the needs of her man in a past world that never existed except in her mind and period magazines. Something Sylvia saw as a betrayal of everything she stood for and brought her daughter up to believe.

Then there is a husband we suspect is living a lie and finding the truth difficult to express, the fun of the six month 1950’s experiment, having been lost a long time ago.

There is plenty to admire in this production staged on Malcolm Robertshaw’s colourful, period set. It is funny, at times hilariously so, yet it is also sad at times as reality hits everyone at some point with the cast bringing each character, good, and bad, to life.

If there is a fault it comes with the numerous scene changes which could have been slicker to avoid losing momentum but that is a minor point, and the 50’s and 60’s music during the changes did stir some memories, so it hardly detracted from a fine production directed by Suzanne Reffin. To 01-02-15.

Roger Clarke

22-01-25 

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