Review: ORPHANS, Jermyn Street Theatre

Lyle Kessler’s Orphans was first performed in 1983, and is set “in the not too distant past”, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that from this production. The tiny Jermyn Street stage feels overcome by Sarah Beaton’s design, retro but not too retro, a space immune to the passing decades.

Trapped in this time capsule are the two titular orphans, whose understanding of the outside world is suitably limited. Chris Walley’s Treat is a former juvenile delinquent who has trapped his younger brother Phillip (Fred Woodley Evans) in a closet for years, because of his supposed allergies to the outside air – the small window at the back of the set is utilised to great effect.

There’s something of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny to Phillip, and not just because Orphans is also set in Philadelphia. He’s never seen a map of the city before, and seems to subsist entirely on tuna and mayonnaise, but the words he underlines in discarded newspapers hint at a certain wisdom.

For all his bravado, meanwhile, Treat cannot seem to leave the house without committing an act of random, trivial violence, incidents that betray the fact that he’s just as innocent as Phillip. The brothers seem to have a relationship driven more by exasperation with one another (there’s more than one sigh of “shut the f*ck up”) than by any kind of real threat.

It’s a dynamic ripe for outside intervention, so enter Harold, a quote-unquote ‘businessman’ clad in a Trilby and alligator loafers and nostalgic for the “Dead End Kids” he knew in Chicago. Buoyed by his discovery of thousands of stocks and bonds in Harold’s briefcase, Treat embarks on a predictably naive and easily unravelled plan to kidnap him.

This type of dramatic structure relies heavily on the success of the intruder’s characterisation, and this is where Orphans falls flat. Too often, Forbes Masson’s Harold veers from magical realism into caricature, an avuncular take on a mafia boss. As he begins to act as a kind of twisted mentor figure to both brothers, his kindness to Phillip and increasing disappointment with Treat feel like cartoonishly opposing poles, rather than sides to the same nuanced coin.

Despite the constraints of the space, this production makes up for some of the script’s shortcomings in its physicality. Al Miller’s playful, naturalistic direction lets the brothers chase and trip each other, collapse and be dragged around, and scamper through aptly placed windows and doors. Much of the verbal humour here is dry and sardonic, so this kind of fast-paced, aggressive slapstick is both a tonic and a reminder to take the play’s underlying violence seriously.

Indeed, early on, Harold tells Treat and Phillip that he “admires violent men”. It’s a sentiment ripe for present-day exploration, and this production certainly brings it to the forefront, but also never quite gets under the skin of these men’s violent streaks. Perhaps this is also an issue with the play existing outside time – in its attempts to conjure a universal fable, this production loses the specificity of some of its characters.

Orphans plays at Jermyn Street Theatre until 24 January