What happens when reality bites the retro bubble on the Eastbourne stage?

The result is Home, I’m Darling which comes to The Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne from March 7-11 and The Theatre Royal Brighton from April 11-15, starring Jessica Ransom as Judy, Diane Keen as Sylvia and Neil McDermott as Johnny.

For Laura (Posh/The Riot Club), the play was a West End hit and received the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2019. The show premiered at Theatr Clwyd in 2018, before playing at the National Theatre prior to West End transfer. Now it is on the road, taking us into the world of Judy and her husband Johnny who live in a sentimental nostalgic bubble. Their decade of choice is the 1950s. It’s all jive dancing on the weekends, swing skirts and starched collars. The chintzy living-room furniture, gingham curtains and retro kitchen appliances hark back to a wistful era of domestic bliss. And when Judy is made redundant, she can live out her fantasies of being the ultimate retro domestic goddess.

But will that rose-tinted-glasses view of living in the past comes into painfully sharp and clear focus when reality bites?

“The name of the play came later but the starting point was I just got really interested in vintage people,” Laura says, “people who have an interest in looking and dressing and trying to live their lives as if they were in an earlier decade and just feeling a really strong affinity to it. It is not necessarily delusion but they just feel that they belong in this other decade, and with this couple it is the 50s. For Judy and Johnny it is all about the music and the clothes and just the whole feel of that time, and they are living their lives through that filter of being in a more community type era where it was all much less confusing and all much more analogue. They feel that the gender rules are clearer at that time, and they just wanted to recreate the idea of a marriage from that time. The play tests that idea. What happens to one of these people who lives all dressed up in 50s clothes at the weekends if they decide to live that way full time? How would that fit in with the modern world which would come knocking at the door?”

The Watsons was a big hit in the Minerva in Chichester in 2018. It was just about to go into rehearsal for a West End run when the lockdowns hit in 2020: “Sadly that show was one of those that didn't come back. I would like to think it would but is a big and expensive show with a large cast but I do think it will rise again one day.”

So much has come back, though… but Laura concedes that theatre is probably still in recovery: “But when we were doing this show last week it was lovely to be in there and to feel the joy of it and the warmth from the audience. It was just great. It was wonderful. I just love that as a writer.” And of course as a writer you can keep your distance: “I know if I stood up in front of people in a room and tried to tell a joke I would totally mangle it, but that's the lovely thing in the theatre. You can craft your words and get the actors to do it for you brilliantly.”

​

​