OWNERS
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Crudely seen (the only way to approach this socialist melodrama), the characters divide into owners and chumps. Chief among the former is Marion, a former mental patient, now a predatory real estate broker whose credo is to grab and hold onto whatever and whomever she craves even if it kills them (at one point she unhesitantly blurts out, “We men of destiny get what we’re after”). The other sharks are Marion’s lummoxy husband, Clegg, a butcher who wants to kill his infertile wife for not providing him with an heir, and Marion’s stooge Worsely, who secretly loves her.
The chumps are Lisa and Alec, a bitterly poor young couple who live with two kids and a senile parent in a cramped flat in a gentrifying neighborhood of north London. Lisa, who washes hair for a living, is pregnant with a third child they can’t afford, while her laborer husband, Alec, mired in morose passivity, indifferent to everything around him, is unable to work. An intended mockery of impotent intellectuals, Alec sits and stares in wonder at the pointlessness of everything.
In his sincere–and unconvincing–Lifeline Theatre staging Gregg Mierow just plays along with Churchill’s rant as if he has decided the surface will do even if the substance isn’t there. In any case this script’s sheer lack of passion takes its toll throughout the ordeal. Melody Rae’s malevolent control freak Marion only needs a broomstick to complete her soap-opera character; despite Rae’s attempt to breathe ambiguity into this treacherous “top girl,” Marion’s one vulnerable outburst–“I know none of you loves me”–passes too weakly to matter. Adam Bitterman richly raunches it up as the swaggering butcher (“I’m more Othello than I am Hamlet”), but face it, the character is a one-man toxic-waste dump. James Sie makes you wish Worsely’s first suicide attempt hadn’t failed.
