Last Updated on May 10, 2025
Everything is disappearing in Parlour Song
rating stars=”4.0″
Greenwich Theatre is staging the first major London revival of Parlour Song by Jez Butterworth (Jerusalem and The Hills of California) since its UK premiere at the Almeida in 2009. Directed by James Haddrell, this is a short shock of a play mixing comic, surreal and disturbing elements against the very ordinary setting of a new-build estate on the leafy edge of London. It tells the story of a demolition man whose own life seems to be collapsing around him.
Parlour Song is three-hander, convincingly played by Naveen Khan as Ned, Kellie Shirley as Joy and Jeremy Edwards as Dale. A fourth character is much mentioned but never appears – Dale’s wife.
Ned is a successful demolition expert who goes around the country blowing up buildings. He’s married to Joy (a misnomer), but senses that all is not right in their relationship. On hand, seemingly to help, is friend and neighbour Dal,e who lives in an identical mirror-image house next door. Their estate was built five years ago on the site ofa thousand-year-old forest. But, according to Ned, everything has its time – the forest and now it’s the turn of the local Arndale Centre, declared obsolete by the powers that be and set to be demolished. Ned describes a recent visit to another new estate of 78 houses identical to theirs. There he sees a rat with a tail the size of a rope sitting in the middle of the floor in the show home – nature is clearly asserting itself over human attempts to tame it.
Ned has lost control of his belongings, his figure, his marriage, and possibly his own mind. As in most cases of fictional paranoia, his doom-laden thoughts will turn out to have some basis.
As the drama opens, rumbling sounds fill the theatre and videos of collapsing buildings are projected onto the interior walls of the house. Ned is giving a long-winded description of a recent demolition job to Dale. The latter may be jealous of the fact that his neighbour has such a stress-busting job – after all, what could be a better cure for all ills than blowing something up – but he has his limits. Ned does not know when to stop and has forgotten that he’s shown the same video to Dale several times. Maybe his memory is disappearing along with his stuff.
“Everything is disappearing,” says Ned. In some ways, Parlour Song is like a dystopian nod to the Generation Game as lists of Ned’s disappearing items are reeled off: knives, a set of Victorian postcards, a bronze bust of Aldous Huxley, a stuffed badger. The list goes on. The connection to the 1970s game show is complete when Ned reveals his pet name for his wife: Cuddly Toy.
However, Joy is no longer cuddly. She is all sharp-angled body language, constantly flinching and clutching her wine box at a dinner served to her by the still devoted Ned. After 11 years of marriage, she has reached peak repulsion and boredom. His slurping, tooth picking, and inconsequential chatter are clearly not working for her.
There is a strong vein of physical comedy to Parlour Song, lending some lightness to Ned’s progressive decline and some relief to the audience. Naveed Khan is adept at wringing comedy from his middle-aged, gone-to-seed character’s efforts at self-improvement, his aims including ridding himself of his man boobs and regrowing a head of hair. Most disturbing (and funniest) is Ned’s attempt to learn some new sex techniques using an instructional tape lent to him by Dale.
It is during one of his workout sessions with Dale that Ned tells a long, circuitous tale of a trip to Gloucester at the height of his romance with Joy. The tale takes on the characteristics of a quest, full of mystery and almost magical happenings, which culminates in the purchase of a birdbath as a love gift for his wife. That morning, Ned got up to find this birdbath missing from his high-walled, locked garden…
Parlour Song may explore mundane themes in a domestic setting, but there’s also a feeling of something more mysterious and mad thrumming underneath, echoing some of the feeling evoked by Butterworth’s Jerusalem. This is a tragi-comedy of quiet, confined proportions that gives one pause to think about what exactly is going on behind the closed doors of Britain’s cookie-cutter estates and terraces of identical houses.
2-24 May 2025
Greenwich Theatre
Crooms Hill,
Greenwich
London
SE10 8ES
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