Yahoo Finance Stranger Things's David Harbour stars in a darkly comic play about his own mental health
The huge success of the Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things has had all kinds of notable knock-on effects. It has just propelled Kate Bush back to the top of the charts. It has also made David Harbour a household name.
Playing the dogged police chief Jim Hopper has meant that Hollywood is now a growing port of call for the 47-year-old actor, and his fame means he can pull the crowds for theatre projects, just as his wife Lily Allen herself did last year in 2: 22 A Ghost Story.
Given that he was last on stage here in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 2006 (he gained plaudits as the young biologist Nick), intrigue levels are high about the premiere of Mad House. Doubly so because American playwright Theresa Rebeck – prolific but seldom produced in the UK – took inspiration from Harbour’s mental health experiences, including his time in institutions when he was a young man. The play isn’t his “life story”, but it’s personal enough to make it unusual: Harbour has something to share with the audience.
That his character Michael has a loose “meta” relationship to the actor is made elbow-nudgingly clear in a teasing allusion to Stranger Things early on, one which elicited a delighted round of applause from fans. Stuck in his father’s dilapidated Pennsylvanian mansion, looking after the fading patriarch (Bill Pullman’s Daniel), “Mikey” likens the latter’s surges of energy to “some demon from the dawn of time… using him as a portal into our universe… there’s this sudden, vicious undiluted release of pure malevolence.” Is it naff as hell to script that? A little, but it underlines the fact that Rebeck is interested in keeping things quirky.
There are more laughs where that came from, a lot of them bound up with a pointed callousness about Daniel’s condition – “Hey Dad, the death nurse is here!” Michael hollers, upon the arrival of Lillian, a hospice carer. The flipness is a coping mechanism: the father is an insult-spewing monster who drove Michael nuts – and while he was in an asylum, his mother succumbed to cancer. There’s much bubbling blame about that.
The dark comedy draws you in, but hits the snag of leaving you a bit high and dry when you yourself are required to care. This show, directed a bit stiffly by Moritz Von Stuelpnagel, isn’t laying claim to the mighty impact of such American family drama behemoths as Long Day’s Journey into Night. All the same, it struggles to dovetail the sharp comic back-biting with a sense of truly gut-wrenching showdown. When Michael’s siblings (Stephen Wight’s Nedward, then Sinead Matthews’ Pam) arrive, quivering with suspicions about their inheritance, the tonal split personality becomes more problematic. Sitcom-ish lines vie with rote-sounding recriminations.
As the damaged man-child, Harbour delivers the requisite goods: hefty, forceful, brooding, tilting between sardonic intensity, petulance and yowling rage. As his dad, however, Pullman often seems more sweetly helpless than residually noxious.
Sinead Matthews enlivens the second half with grasping spikiness and emerging sorrow, and there’s strong supporting work too from Akiya Henry as the empathetic carer. I wanted to love it more. On an abstract level the evening makes valid points about how hard the family straitjacket can be to escape. But the elaboration of resentments has a pre-fab quality. Something of a halfway-house hit, then.
Until Sept 4. Tickets: 0844 871 7615; atgtickets.com
