LEANING UP: Natalia Tena, Joanna McCallum, Eleanor Bron and Patricia Hodge in The Clean House
On the surface this play is about housework, who does it, who loves it and who hates it.
But it is just a metaphor for the lives of the people in the story.
The tidy, perfect world of Lane (Patricia Hodge), successful doctor, married to eminent surgeon Charles (Oliver Cotton), is about to get messy.
The immaculate living room of her home grows messier as the play progresses and order turns to chaos as passions turn their lives upside down.
Lane employs a Mexican maid to clean her house. Matilde (Natalia Tena) doesn't like cleaning. She comes from a family of natural comedians and her ambition is to create the perfect joke - bizarrely her mother died laughing.
Meanwhile Lane's sister Virginia (Joanna McCallum) is an obsessive cleaner because she has nothing better to do and comes to an arrangement behind Lane's back to do Matilde's work for her.
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Then Charles, the perfect husband, falls in love with one of his patients, Ana (Eleanor Bron) a woman of 67 on whom he performed a mastectomy.
The Clean House, By Sarah Ruhl, Theatre Royal Bath
Most of the comedy is generated by Matilde - in Portuguese - although there are some dry one-liners elsewhere. It is a very clever performance by Miss Tena, crisp, intelligent and beautifully timed.
Miss Hodge delivers a familiar cool, controlled personality with emotion simmering below the surface, while as her sister, Miss McCallum is the picture of low self esteem and eagerness to be of use to someone, anyone.
Eleanor Bron radiates the warmth of a free spirit in a drama which is poignant, sometimes surreal .
From the balcony of Ana's house discarded apples and clothes are thrown, landing in Lane's sitting room - metaphorically cluttering her life with the fall-out from theirs.
The style is like a series of snapshots. There are also written subtitles on screens either side of the stage, occasionally to translate Matilde's Portuguese, but mostly like explanatory captions in a silent film.
It's a play to ponder on long after the curtain falls.
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