HARD FEELINGS
The English yuppies and trendies in Doug Lucie’s Hard Feelings are very skilled at smashing things up–mainly themselves. But only after they’ve hurt others even worse. What’s more, they’re not alone. Like High Hopes, Owners, Knuckle, Road, and Pravda, Hard Feelings supplies more ugly proof that racial bigotry and moneyed arrogance are respectable traits in Margaret Thatcher’s unmerry England.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The class clash is implicit in the situation: privileged young people are living in gentrified splendor amid the poverty of London’s Brixton; ironically, it’s just before the 1981 riots break out. The smug, selfish crew is headed by insufferable Vivienne, a poor little Oxford-educated rich girl who’s a virtual Thatcher clone. Vivienne toils not, neither does she spin; but she does love to shop. The most important thing about Vivienne is that she owns the house they all live in–a fact of which she reminds her tenant-friends whenever she wants her way.
The final worthless yup who shares Viv’s nasty little home is Baz, a rock-concert producer and a sad, sexist twit; ineffectual and useless, he may mean well but he doesn’t dare prove it while Viv’s around.
Because of these shortcomings, it’s crucial that the BDI Theater Company make this U.S. premiere zip along, downplaying or coasting through the talkier scenes and Lucie’s repetitive indictments of his blatant bastards. Jim Tillett’s reverent staging, however, makes the weaker first-act exposition as important as the stronger second-act conflicts. Not all of these 140 minutes are above excision. Still, except for some accents that seem to hail from Dixie (the English do not confuse “Hi” with “Ha”), this is Tillett’s sole misstep. In the rest, particularly the casting, Hard Feelings shows solid stagecraft; its rotten events are as satisfyingly down and dirty as in Strawdog Theatre’s Five of Us or Next Theatre’s Knuckle.
