Enjoy

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

3/5

ENJOY  was such a commercial failure when it premiered in 1980 that Alan Bennett quipped it should be renamed Endure.

His dark comedy has nonetheless thrived over the intervening years and its experimental edge is delightfully at odds with Bennett’s status as a national treasure.

It opens with kitchen-sink naturalism as an elderly couple engage in the kind of familiar, amiable bickering that shows Bennett’s great ear for dialogue.  But as the plot unwinds, matters get increasingly surreal.

A council sociologist (Rob Delaney) visits the pair in one of the last back-to-backs in Leeds before it’s demolished, the community destroyed and they’re moved into maisonettes. It’s a sea change that’s met with delight by Dad (Philip Martin Brown, pictured) and chagrin by Mam (Marlene Sidaway), who’s grappling with early-stage dementia.

Faced with the blank, uncommunicative observer they struggle to act naturally and their hyper-real conversations begin to reveal dark cracks in their family and in community life.

The highly prescient theme of observation gets more surreal when their daughter (Sian Reese-Williams) and neighbour (a brilliant Vanessa Rosenthal) appear, both also trailed by sociologists documenting their behaviour.

As a precursor of reality television, director James Brining has emphasised the play’s parallels to the likes of Big Brother and Towie by swapping notebooks for video recorders and film footage so that it’s never entirely clear who’s watching whom. 

It’s an artifice that, as in The Truman Show, is ultimately stripped away when the very set is torn apart around the characters. 

This turns the play about the heritage industry’s cosy representation of community spirit and close-knit northern life  into a wider social satire. While the two sections feel rather clumsily welded together, Enjoy does reveal a welcome experimentalism in Bennett’s work.

Susan Darlington