Caryl Churchill’s 1970s play’s themes are still relevant but this modern production wasn’t able to find the right tone
Written in the early 1970s, Owners was Caryl Churchill’s first professionally produced play, and undoubtedly lacks the finesse of her later pieces. Its themes of class struggle, property, possession, and power all remain relevant in the modern world, however the script definitely feels of its time, and this production at Jermyn Street Theatre did not manage to fine the right tone to truly update it.
The set design was clever, with a row of working blue front doors at once invoking an up-and-coming London road, and the tiny rooms its inhabitant occupy. We open in a failing butcher shop, where we meet the owner Clegg (Mark Huckett) and his customer Worsley (Tom Morley). The set up seems to suggest a double act. There are moments of humour as Clegg tries to sell Worsely rotten meat, and again as Worsley plots his own death, and Clegg his wife’s. Tom Morley as Worsley especially found a lot of genuine morbid comedy with his touching portrayal of a henchman with a death wish, and ultimately a conscience. The comedy is undercut by Clegg’s stream of misogynistic anecdotes. None of this is entirely out of place in a satire with a sharp political message, but the piece never settles on the right tone to really make it work.
Clegg’s successful wife, Marion (played with nuance, by a commanding Laura Doddington) is a woman desperate to better herself. She plans to make the most of the booming London housing market by flipping houses. Only the current tenants, her ex-lover and his wife, stand in her way. It soon becomes evident that everyone in this play will either stop at nothing to get what they want at an increasingly catastrophic cost to those around them, or thinks that nothing matters at all.
However, as the play moves to darker and darker subject matter it becomes evident that things that should matter, do not. For instance, when sexual assault took place onstage it was given very little weight, and when a man and child were burned alive the audience were not given any time to process what had occurred. These moments were brushed over in favour of a more comedic tone that was not quite absurd enough to be funny, and that left the audience uneasy.
Churchill pointed to this play as a turning point in her career when she began to write predominantly for the stage, so when the show was first staged at the Royal Court it must have made waves. On the face of it the themes of this play should still be able to hit a chord with modern audiences, but this production never quite makes it sing.