Review: A Delicate Balance

‘Domestic drama’ is a label that might not do justice to Poppy Kimtris (director) and Ava Pegg-Davis’ (producer) production of A Delicate Balance. Although the play is a conventional drama grounded in Aristotle’s three unities (one living room, just over one day, and one line of action), its subject matter is far from ‘domestic.’ Characteristic of this era in drama (1960s United States), A Delicate Balance focuses on psychological realism, sprawling family tensions, and fragmentation.

As one insightful Guardian review put it: “Edward Albee wrote as though he’d filed every typewriter key down to a fine point and replaced the space bar with a scalpel.” The script was as incisive as the acting. Every line was delivered with the utmost importance and nothing was a throwaway comment, captivating the audience from the get-go, even during the play’s most baffling moments.

The only drawback was that the play’s final act dragged on for what felt like days, with long pauses between every line. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with a ‘dramatic pause,’ when it’s overused, it can become quite tiresome. Up to the final act, however, the delivery of lines was faultless, with the pace and tone setting a scene of the upper-middle class and their first-world problems.

Agnes’ (Orsolya Haynes) ramble at the start of the play, in which she refers to herself in the third person and questions whether she might be insane, piqued the audience’s attention — not ‘peaked’ as, to quote Agnes, her life “is bereft of mountains.” This quote sums up the character of Agnes, so perfectly portrayed by Haynes, as a plain woman with a stiff upper lip.

What struck me was how timeless the play is — we all know women like Agnes in our lives, unfortunately. To complement Haynes’ steady upper-middle class-ness, Buster Ratcliff van der Geest’s Tobias was the picture of the repressed husband, an accessory of his occasionally nutty wife. His expressionlessness allows us to view him not simply as a man fed up with the continuum of life but also, in a deeply poignant way, as a man with unreleased potential.

The mood of the scene quickly changes with the arrival of the bibulous Claire (Keenan Parker – superb English accent), whose stage presence won the audience over. She delivered a fabulously comic yet tragic portrayal of an alcoholic, striking a delicate balance between the two modes. The scene turns on its head with the arrival of Julia (Hannah Glen), whose facial expressions were just masterpieces — never have I seen so much emotion in an actor’s face! Obstreperous, cantankerous, and as moody as an adolescent, I don’t think anyone is supposed to be on Julia’s side, least of all her discontented parents.

Forming the spine of the play’s main plot is the arrival of Agnes and Tobias’ family friends, the perfectly poised Edna (Lila Ahnger) and the slapstick Harry (Rupert Carter). Fear is their reason for arriving unannounced. As Harry says, “It was like being lost, very young again, with the dark, and lost. There was nothing to be frightened of, but...” Edna, through disjointed weeps, continues “We were frightened and there was nothing!” The ensuing mayhem results from a seemingly trivial detail: they were occupying Julia’s bedroom. How we get from there to Glen bringing on a knife (yes, I was a bit scared) as she marches through the audience as madly as Lady Macbeth, I will never quite understand.

One thing that amused me was Carter’s facial expressions whilst others were delivering weighty lines. He was almost always pulling a silly face, walking with his rear-end stuck out like Donald Duck, or necking back another drink. Carter explained that he was, in his performance, “trying to get away with as much as possible as the director never told [him] not to.” He had to “act seriously” during the second night, however. Intended or not, he provided some much-needed comic relief to the lacerating drama.

Albee’s aim with A Delicate Balance was to show the gradual decay of the American Dream, the slow unravelling of a marriage, and a family's stagnation. Kimtris had much the same intention (although transferred into a typical British sitting room) and was certainly successful in doing so, especially in a university context where people don’t always want to see posh families complaining about their problems.

Photo courtesy of Ryan Cunningham