Mrs Delgado, review: provocative, uncannily topical new drama from Mike Bartlett
I’m pretty sure Mike Bartlett hoped his new play wouldn’t be quite so timely. With the audience swaddled in masks, and a new variant forcing the Prime Minister to sweatily thumb through his Big Book of Apocalyptic Analogies, 70 minutes of jittery lockdown monologue can be few people’s idea of a jolly time.
Then again, Bartlett specialises in wincingly contemporary drama. His Oliver-winning King Charles III imagined the ascent to the throne of a vain, brittle Prince Charles after the death of the Queen – and Prince Harry quitting the Firm to shack up with a mixed-race commoner. His BBC drama Doctor Foster, meanwhile, can be partially credited with TV’s current obsession with swanky kitchens and middle-class mania.
So his latest, Mrs Delgado, at the Old Fire Station in Oxford, is uncannily abreast of the news cycle. But it is a wittier, spikier proposition than its ripped-from-the-headlines premise would suggest. It takes us inside the mind of Helen, a lonely young woman who, in the draconian depths of the first lockdown, spends her time doom-scrolling, comfort eating, fretting about comfort eating, and spying on her neighbours. These include Mrs Delgado, the hippyish older woman who lives opposite her.
Each day, Mrs Delgado reliably entertains Helen with “a new piece of madness”. Yet her most troubling behaviour is her devil-may-care attitude to the rules and her insistence on greeting all visitors, even Amazon delivery drivers, with “proper 2019 physical affection”. We follow as Helen resolves to confront Mrs Delgado, and Mrs Delgado decides – horror of horrors – to throw a street party.
As with 2018’s Snowflake, which saw a father-daughter Christmas meal descend into open warfare, Bartlett shuttlecocks our loyalties across generations. Lockdown, he suggests, shackled us in unresolvable emotional binds: both snitches and spies, libertines and prigs, Helens and Mrs Delgados. A split-personality nation.
In its humour and frowsy claustrophobia, there’s a touch of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads here. Britney’s Ellen Robertson, a late replacement for Rakhee Sharma and on-book, is terrific, bringing both women to life with marvellous clarity. She plays Helen as coiled, self-critical and anxious. Her Mrs Delgado, by contrast, is a treat – voice tanned to rawhide by fag smoke, hip cocked forward in the suggestion of something slinky, and eyebrow raised to skewer Helen’s fluttering entreatries like a butterfly on a pin.
The spare, intimate staging – chairs ringed around a small space in the centre, the odd ricochet of muffled music – allows Robertson’s performance to breathe. And there’s a haunting moment towards the end when Robertson’s delivery and subtle lighting combine to show joy can break through even into the cardboard existence of lockdown.
It’s a shame, then, that the play makes two late missteps. The first is Helen voicing an anti-capitalist rant which feels unearned and misplaced in this otherwise timid and tongue-tied woman’s mouth. The second is the rug-pull revelation in the play’s closing line that someone – presumably the playwright – has been watching the women and “wonder[ing] who they were”. This comes too late for its implications to be explored; it’s a gotcha twist better suited to Line of Duty than to the careful, intricate world Bartlett has built over the past hour.
Still, for those with the stomach to revisit lockdown, Mrs Delgado is a compelling, provocative piece of theatre. But afterwards, I’ve rarely felt more relieved to escape to the bright lights and shared pathogens of the pub.
Until Dec 21. Tickets: oldfirestation.org.uk
