In the real world, most people don't present their loved ones with the incendiary memoir they have written about their own family just before dinner on Christmas Eve. Yet this is not the real world, but rather a witty, literate, if just occasionally glib, American drama by Jon Robin Baitz that arrives here laden with acclaim and with five zinging parts for actors.
Other Desert Cities marks the start of a season of Old Vic plays presented in the round – after the success of this format for The Norman Conquests in 2008 – and what a difference this makes. It can be a spaciously unforgiving auditorium but now it’s intimate and up-close, as we watch the Wyeth family sparring like boxers in a Californian ring for director Lindsay Posner. In a witty design touch, a palm tree is placed diagonally opposite a Christmas tree.
Mum Polly (Sinéad Cusack) and father Lyman (Peter Egan), a Reagan-esque actor turned Republican, are wealthy inhabitants of Palm Springs; their fragile writer daughter Brooke (Martha Plimpton) arrives from New York full of differing political convictions and grief for a long-dead renegade brother. Baitz worries productively at chewy themes such as the inherent selfishness of the artist and our divergent takes on ‘shared’ family memories, but I struggled to believe that Brooke could have been so naïve as to think that her parents wouldn’t feel mortally betrayed by what she planned to reveal to the world.
Cusack, full of icy rationality and aversion to ‘lefties whining’ and Plimpton, who cleverly deploys Brooke’s depressive tendencies as a get-out-of-jail free card, both give magnificent performances; Clare Higgins slyly steals scenes as an alcoholic aunt. In fact, come an unlikely second half reveal, they increasingly soar above the material they are given.
Until May 24 (0844 871 7628, www.oldvictheatre.com)
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