Review: House of America

Guild drama in Birmingham has been at a particularly good standard this term, and so I went to see House of America with high hopes. Just walking into the Dance Studio fulfilled those hopes for me. The lights were dimmed, soft music was playing and the set-up of the stage looked fantastic. 3Bugs had really outdone themselves with the staging of the play, the edge of which marked by coal at the audience’s feet.

Set in the valleys of Wales, House of America is the story of a small dysfunctional family living out their days in a house by the mountains in the shadow of a new coal mine, which causes mass upheaval within the family in more ways than one. The only word you could use for the space was intimate. The cast were unfazed by coming up to the audience and speaking directly to them. Being set in Wales, the cast also had the challenge of putting on Welsh accents, which they all did expertly and without any huge slip-ups.

The play begins with Mother, (the amazing Mary Davies) giving a monologue about how her husband left the family many years before with promises of going to America. Much of Mother’s dialogue is said as an aside, both in English and Welsh. Davies did this incredibly well, conveying the Mother’s apparent decline in sanity, as well as fear of her children abandoning her.

The idea of ‘the grass is greener’ is a key obsession between two of the children, Sid (Jack Alexander) and Gwenny (Lily Blacksell), who become obsessed with the American writer Jack Kerouac and his lover Joan Haverty. The depiction of this spiraling sibling relationship was handled very well by the actors, handling the closer moments just as well as the more the ‘real world’ scenes.

House of America is definitely a play where the tone is always changing. You leave the first act feeling unsure of how to feel. There are plenty of laughs and the tone is light and bright – though this ensures you will be stunned by the second act, where the plot development takes a drastic shift. Boyo, the third child, (Jacob Lovick) is faced with the wreckage of a family with no hope. It is here where Lovick really shines in his role, having close one-on-one scenes with every character in the show. It’s through Boyo’s eyes that you see the family crumbling within itself, and Lovick handles that beautifully, showing the character’s inner turmoil and confusion towards events going on around him.

Whilst the cast did an incredible job with the ups and downs of the narrative (of which there were many), the show would definitely have been missing a spark had it not been for the music. Nick Charlesworth, Anya Hancock, Dan Williams and Martin Cousins made up the faultless band, adding both Welsh song and folk music to many scenes, which really made the play in many ways, as it breathed that extra gust of life into every scene.

3Bugs’ production House of America was a stunning performance where tone and quality of performance was right on the mark. I can’t wait to see what 3Bugs do next.

House of America was performed in the Dance Studio of the Guild, 24th-26th March 2014.