Grief, more like Boredom - Samuel Sugarman

As I walked into the Cottesloe Theatre at the National to see the play Grief, I was quite excited.  Mike Leigh, in the past, has been known as a great writer who develops his characters throughout the show and really gets the audience involved by creating scenarios that people can relate too.  His dialogue also has been lauded as moving and smart.  With all of this knowledge, plus the fact that getting a ticket is near impossible, I was quite excited to see a show that I was sure was going to be a hit.  Boy was I in for a surprise.

From the moment the first character took the stage I knew that I had made a mistake by coming to this show.  With a title like Grief I knew this was not going to be an uplifting show, but I had no idea how utterly boring and slow the show was going to be.  A better title would have been “unmoving” or “motionless” as those titles would have described the feel of the play much more aptly.

Lesley Manville plays Dorothy, a single mother in 1954 London.  She lives in middle-class suburbia and lost her husband during World War II and has yet to get over this loss.  However, she refuses to talk about how upset she is by not having him around, so to compensate she keeps everything just the way it was when he was still alive.

The only person she is able to even slightly open up to is her brother, played by Sam Kelly who increase.  The only issue is that her brother, Edwin, is so appose to confrontation that when it arises, he simply shuts down and ignores everything that is going on as if it is all okay.  Most of these issues come from Dorothy’s daughter Victoria, played by Ruby Bentall, who often only curtly talks to her mother and instigates fights then storms up to her room.

The mundane feeling of the lives of these people is always in the forefront.  Each day seems to be the same with Dorothy making tea, having a friend come over, then Edwin coming home from work followed by Victoria who says something in a sarcastic manner, which upsets her mother.  Her mother tries to tell Victoria that she loves her, Victoria gets angry, then storms up the stairs and slams her door.  This is essentially a summary of the play over 2 unbroken hours.

 After you see this scene play out over and over again, you begin to stop feeling bad for the characters and instead start to wish that something would happen to stir the pot, only nothing ever does.  There were multiple points where Leigh could have put in something to shift the pace and keep the audience interested, but instead he waited until the end to make any drastic change when (spoiler alert) Dorothy lets out a blood curdling scream as she finds her daughter has committed suicide in her room.

The acting in this play is quite good, but the writing holds them back from actually developing their characters.  It is like the acts are stuck on a merry-go-round for 2 hours, seeing the same thing over and over again, until one of them decides to jump off and that is finally when you see, for the first time, the people’s true character.  It’s unfortunate that the audience had to wait 2 hours for this one moment of clarity.