Leaves

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3 stars 3 stars

Michael Billington, The Guardian, 20th March 2007

Suicide is in the theatrical air this spring. After The Reporter and Dying For It, we have this highly promising first play by 24-year-old Lucy Caldwell that explores what drives a teenage student to make an attempt on her life. Even if it doesn’t provide a definitive answer, the play probes the resulting family tensions with psychological acuity.

Caldwell sets the action in the Belfast home of 19-year-old Lori as she returns from London after taking an overdose; and what we see is the family’s helplessness in the face of her depression. Dad, locked into writing a book on the etymology of Irish place names, can’t find the words to cope. Lori’s mum, meanwhile, is almost over-solicitous in trying to get to the bottom of things. And Lori’s younger sisters, Clover and Poppy, fiercely resent their displacement in their mother’s affections.

Rightly, Caldwell leaves open the source of Lori’s malaise: it may spring from fears of the global future, Belfast’s strained normality or London exile. What gives the play its peculiar tang is Caldwell’s sensitivity to the fluctuations of family life which emerge strongly in Garry Hynes’s Druid Theatre production staged in the Theatre Upstairs. Fiona Bell captures exactly the mother’s anxious attentiveness which leads her to assume that depression may spring from dietary problems. Conor Lovett as the uncommunicative father, Penelope and Daisy Maguire as the marginalised sisters and Kathy Rose O’Brien as the sadly unreachable Lori convey the multiple manifestations of stress as Caldwell confirms the Tolstoyan truth that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. 3 stars 3 stars

Paul Taylor, The Independent, 21st March 2007

Let’s all play at unhappy families

Lori had always done every-thing expected of her, until she did the devastatingly unexpected. The eldest of three girls, she had fulfilled her mother’s dream of getting out of Belfast by landing a place at university in London. But just a few weeks into her first term, she had nearly died after swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. Her premature homecoming is fraught with tension, guilt, anger and grief, both for Lori and her bewildered middle-class family.

Leaves – Lucy Caldwell’s George Devine Award-winning debut play – dramatises the stresses of this desolate situation with unblinking insight and quiet, rueful humour. Lori does not appear until the second act, but the pressure of her offstage presence is powerful in Garry Hynes’s sensitive Royal Court/Druid co-production.

At an edgy family dinner on the eve of Lori’s return, no one can think of anything else. The anxious, preoccupied mother Phyllis (Fiona Bell) upsets her middle daughter Clover by forgetting to ask about her crucial audition for the orchestra. Not that it went well, given the distractions. The father David (Conor Lovett) retreats into his research for a book about Irish place names, which he intones in a litany to ward off his wife’s attempt at a 4am heart-to-heart.

On her first night home, Lori refuses to come down for the meal of “haricot bean and root vegetable stew with curly kale” that Phyllis has prepared specially from The Optimum Nutrition Bible, in the desperate hope that her daughter’s suicidal depression stems from something as explicable as an inadequate diet.

Leaves is particularly acute about the strains imposed on the younger family members who had looked up to Lori as a role-model, and the 11- and 15-year-old siblings, Poppy and Clover, are beautifully played by real-life sisters Daisy and Penelope Maguire. Poor Poppy is touchingly eager to comfort Lori and to make up for the intimacy she feels she missed out on in the past, excluded by the age-gap from the closeness enjoyed by her sisters.

Pricklier and more defensive, Clover feels betrayed by the sister of whom she had once been so proud. “I’m going to have to ask you to be very grown up,” their mother tells them, and you can see how the sea-change caused by Lori’s plight is demanding more of them than can be reasonably required.

Like The Reporter, the Nicholas Wright play now at the National that explores the possible motivations for James Mossman’s suicide, Leaves suggests that there can often be no definitive reason why someone attempts to take their own life. But some explanations seem more persuasive than others. “We are where we come from? That’s not true,” asserts Phyllis, defiantly trying to silence her own insecurities. “That’s not true because if that’s true there’s no hope for anyone.”

Despite the parents’ efforts to shelter their children from the most unsettling aspects of their native city, Belfast seems to have left its malign imprint on the psyche of Kathy Rose O’Brien’s disturbingly out-of-reach Lori, perhaps ingraining an existential pessimism that her mother’s belief in the possibility of progress (“You’re much happier than I was and don’t you dare say that you aren’t”) is unable to alter.

The play leaves Lori poised on what may or may not be an emotional breakthrough, and flashes back in the final section to the family party thrown for her just before she set off for university in the garden where the tree (in Francis O’Connor’s fine design) is symbolically hung with toys and dream-catchers. Subtly, we are shown Lori registering the weight of parental expectation. The evening fades but she begs that they stay out to enjoy what remains of the autumnal sunset. It’s almost as though she intuits that this is not a new beginning but the end. 3 stars 3 stars

Sarah Hemming, The Financial Times, 21st March 2007

The possibility of losing a child is a fear that haunts every parent. But what if a child tries to commit suicide? How does a parent cope with the implications of that? It is this painful territory that Lucy Caldwell explores, bravely, in her first play, presented here by Druid Theatre.

Leaves examines the impact on an ordinary Belfast family of the oldest daughters unsuccessful suicide attempt. The action begins on the evening before 19-year-old Lori returns home from the clinic. It is clear from the tense atmosphere that no one knows how to behave and that family ties are under intolerable strain. Everyone has reacted differently to Loris overdose.

Dad, researching a book on the etymology of place names, backs off and buries himself obsessively in his work, as if pinning down words could somehow compensate for not being able to pin down his daughters malaise. Mum is the opposite, desperately, restlessly trying to fix Lori, hunting down recipes that might alleviate depression. 15-year-old Clover is furious with her sister. It is perhaps 11-year-old Poppy who expresses the problem most clearly: Theres no way of knowing whats actually going on in someones head.

And indeed we never know what prompted Lori, an intelligent girl from a loving family, to take an overdose whether it was isolation at university; the impact of growing up with the Troubles; despair at the state of the world; a combination of all these; or none of them at all. She remains out of reach. The best scenes in the play are the two in which Mum (Fiona Bell, pale, tense and believably consumed by anguish) edges towards Lori (played with sad stillness by Kathy Rose OBrien). Here Caldwell digs deep, touches on raw pain and the result is moving.

This is a first play, and elsewhere it has some of the flaws you might expect: it aims for a naturalism that does not always convince, despite Garry Hynes sensitive production, and the characters positions are too neatly opposed. But Caldwell raises a real and painful issue and it was an inspired decision to make the final scene a flashback to the eve of Loris home-leaving, revealing the ease and harmony that now seem beyond reach.

Quentin Letts, The Daily Mail, 20th March 2007

Middle-class family life has not been much in vogue with the new playwrights recently given houseroom at the Royal Court. Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves restores some balance handsomely.

Here is a strikingly mature work, both upsetting and, in the end, uplifting.

At times the writing demands unfeasibly rapid mood changes from the actors and a final scene in flashback is a bold step which does not yet quite feel right.

But the generous humanity – here, at last, is a new play with some likeable characters – compensates for these possible flaws.

The play shows a well-to-do Belfast family suffering the trauma of the eldest daughter returning home early from university.

Lori (Kathy Rose O’Brien) has hit terrible depression and has tried to harm herself. Her mother (Fiona Bell) and father (excellent Conor Lovett) are horrified. They show their unhappiness very differently.

He, being a man, retreats inside himself. I often consider myself to be an emotional incontinent but this guy wins prizes at it. His wife is wound tighter than a rubber band and comes close to snapping several times. Yet somehow, being a family, they stick together.

What gives this play great freshness is the presence of two younger daughters, 16-ish Clover (Penelope Maguire) and 12-year-old Poppy (Daisy Maguire).

Little Poppy is an inquisitive doll, a force of energy and innocence who hides under the kitchen table when things are going wrong. Her simple desire for normality and a loving household helps the wounds of Lori’s depression start to heal. Daisy Maguire is magnificent in the part.

There are passages in this play which will take away the breath of fretful parents everywhere the worries we have for our children, the way we hope we do the right things for them, the pride as they become independent allied to the desperate anxiety of them not being happy.

Your baby’s not going to break, the midwives say. But can we be sure they are right?

Leaves will make you clasp tight your youngsters and thank God for the good times. The best way of getting through this tornado of life is with your family.