Shay Mace
In a creaking, ancient house, a mother and a son sit, paralytically emphatic that neither one of them will answer the door that has received an unexpected visitor late in the night. Julian Guassardo’s peculiar, remarkable script is transformed into an expansive, writhing gothic horror in meticulous direction from Micky Gibbons, and through Guassardo & Maggie Rose’s dual performances as a turgid and faltering family falling through the cracks of time, space and consciousness. It’s a scintillating, surreal experience, with just as strange a title, that is as much a character study of a failed pompous artist as it is an interrogation of a disintegrating household, and in many ways, something even more intangibly existential.
To try and weight in with some context, The Perils of Youth section of the title seems to refer to the Son’s bombastic career as a writer, and his presumed self-importance that takes him so far as the brink in his relationship with his aged and incapacitated mother. Rose’s Mother spends much of the performance welded to an armchair, while Guassardo’s Son paces around the room emphatically throwing his limbs around in despair, and in doing so the pair replicate morbid imagery across childhood, petulance, profanity and beyond, leaving both characters staring fervently in the void while refusing to look at one another. There are moments where it becomes repetitive and static, but à la Beckett, it contributes to the foreboding philosophy buried within the story.
Guassardo’s script shows severe and often flamboyant lyrical excellence, with verbose trailing sentences colliding with one another throughout, yet it also carries an emotional intensity that is never withdrawn for a second, never allowing you to catch your breath. As we approach the inevitable opening of the door that has held both of these characters captive for so long, the play does not so much follow a plot but present an unravelling of circumstance; a revelation of the porcelain veneer loosely holding together the lives of these two, incompatible, stubborn and self-interested people. The Son does not simply wish for his inheritance but for the baggage associated with it to be released, the Mother no longer able to recognise the humanity in the boy she has raised to be a man.
Corniced by a jet black, effervescent soundscape from Dan Hibbert, and engrossing antique set design by Shannon Craik, the production and design elements of the piece synchronise effortlessly to create a macabre, grotesque dreamscape that suits the despair of both characters dutifully.
It’s a story that comes without resolution, nor fanciful ideas about what it wishes to impress on its audience, more in the expressive vein it dives deep into the psyches and strains of this duo, tethered together in the ether, banished to repeat the same arguments and frustrations over and over until the rich darkness of the entire situation consumes them both. It is, in that sense, exquisitely crafted, offering both a bizarre introspection and ferocious horror, even if it does not seek to so actively comment on the conditions that have led to this particular story. There are glimpses of class analysis that emerge, but are not fully anchored, rather placing the dramatic weight on the core relationship at the piece’s centre instead – a deteriorating, shifting phantasmagoria that never relents for a moment.
Won’t you pour us a cup of tea, Mother?
The Perils of Youth; or The Gall of the House of Sud
About the show
“Mother. There is someone at the door. We have a visitor, mother, at this hour…” An ancient house. An unseen apparition. A wicked old crone and her pompous, disgraced son. And a family argument that…
Maia Kahn
