Bungalow review – secrets and cries in a family home of horrors

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‘Don’t play with your food,” Bernadette tells her daughter, Agatha. Wash your face, she demands. Don’t swear, she says with a tut. When Agatha hurts herself, Bernadette applies the plaster.

It’s an innocuous scenario except Agatha – newly promoted at work, boyfriend in tow – is old enough to have her own children (she’s about to start trying) and has only returned home because her dad is in hospital. She falls back into familiar routines with her mum but from the start Ruth D’Silva’s play explores complicated acts of parental control as well as kindness, the tables frequently turning. Bernadette’s cruelty comes in flashes, her withering tone towards Agatha at odds with how she talks to her framed Jesus. After the interval, the daughter is warning her mother that she’ll be putting her down for a nap.

Home discomforts … Lydia Bakelmun in Bungalow.

The walls of this bungalow don’t quite talk – José Guillermo Puello’s sound design has them groaning instead – but there is a palpable sense of what the building has witnessed, as D’Silva unfurls a tale of inherited trauma and cycles of abuse. Caitlin Mawhinney’s jagged set design suggests a sickness that has seeped into the bricks; Cheng Keng’s lighting makes even the lumpy wallpaper menacing. Shadows spread like damp.

The air quickly becomes fetid with resentment in Beth Kapila’s production. “It’s this place, you know what it does to me,” apologises Agatha’s brother Luke after an outburst. But the play’s attempt to make the building a character in its own right, and the production’s increasingly schlocky horror effects, can distract from the messy relationships.

Amid the tension, D’Silva proves a humorous writer, even if the comic timing in the performances is sometimes off. Despair and desire curdle together in a scene where Agatha and her partner Steven get the ick about having sex in her parents’ bed. That night ends with a disturbing melding of memory and fantasy – just one more can of worms Agatha has opened up, observes Steven.

It is the mother-daughter relationship that is most compelling, with Fisun Burgess and Lydia Bakelmun respectively giving nuanced performances, not least in the tender scenes where Agatha savours Bernadette’s singing. Mikhael DeVille as Luke and Jack Bence as Steven have less to play with, as their various relationships are sketched without enough detail, yet each establishes a sense of unease. Agatha’s absent father makes his presence felt through other characters’ impersonations and in the use of a portrait with a Francis Bacon-style swiped blur across the face.

The stagecraft can become overwrought – a simple struck match, by contrast, is done powerfully – and the script could afford to leave more unsaid. The lasting impression is of characters on different frequencies, yet sharing a need to be loved, including by themselves, and a need for release. The father’s love of TV sleuth Columbo, and the very character name of Agatha, leave you wondering what the effect would have been if D’Silva had withheld some clues from this mystery and kept her audience in the dark for longer about the house’s past horrors. But this is a playwright refreshingly willing to plumb the depths – or rather, like her heroine, crack open a can of worms.