London Theater Journal: Trapped

LONDON â€" So you think life was better 30 years ago, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan ruled the earth? How about 100 years ago, in the gentle twilight of the glamorous British gentry? People at least knew who they were then, and where they were going. Right?

If you truly believe that, you might well benefit from the inoculation against nostalgia that I recently received here. The treatment occupied the better part of a day, and it involved spending time in close quarters with some rather unpleasant people. But just try playing the theme music from “Dynasty” or “Downton Abbey” for me now, and I’ll run screaming from the room.

This new counter-sentimental frame of mind was induced by my experience in a single day of first-rate productions of two plays I had never seen: Githa Sowerby’s “Rutherford and Son,” first staged in 1912, and Doug Lucie’s “Hard Feelings,” from 1982. Both are st in the time in which they were written, and they suggest that in terms of potential for happiness, there’s not much difference between these eras of self-denial and self-indulgence.

What feels particularly relevant to our own time of directionless, jobless youth is the portrayals of cultures that devour their own children, or at least chew them up and spit them out. “Rutherford and Son,” directed by the august Jonathan Miller at the new St. James Theater, compares the patriarch at its center to the ancient, child-sacrifice-demanding god Moloch.

Though his name is never directly mentioned, Mammon, he who is worshiped by lucre lovers, might be considered the tutelary deity of “Hard Feelings,” staged by James Hillier at the Finborough Theater. And though they are separated by seven decades, these dramas make it clear that the class system was alive, well and stultifying throughout the 20th century in Great Britain.

Mr. Miller, whose long and il! lustrious career includes benchmark productions of Shakespeare and classical operas, stages “Rutherford” in a smothering cocoon of darkness. (Isabella Bywater is the designer, and Guy Hoare did the eye-straining lighting.) The characters whom we first meet don’t do much to light up a room either. They’re sullen, cowering souls â€" snapping and sniping at one another in a big, bleak house in the industrial North of England â€" as they wait for Father to come home.

Father, John Rutherford, owns a glassworks factory, which he created and devotes most of his waking moments to running. Say what you will about dear old Dad. As played by Barrie Rutter, the founder and artistic director of the Northern Broadsides Theater (where this production originated), the old man has the concentrated, consuming fire of one of his factory’s furnaces.

“Rutherford and Son,” which was seen in New York in a Mint Theater Company production last year, charts the consequences of standing too close to such heat. His grown sons and daughter, who have been scorched and shriveled by his tyranny, all make their bids for freedom in the course of this drama. But the best that can be hoped for any of them is basic and base survival.

Though we know from the outset that the story is bound to end in tears - or would, if the characters weren’t so dried-up emotionally - it still has the power to hypnotize. The air of oppression generated by the mise-en-scene assumes the more specific forms of social and economic entrapment for each of the characters, and the play resonates with the sound of one door after another closing on them.

The choices available to women, in particular, are horrifying in their limitedness. (Sowerby, who had to conceal her gender when the play was produced at the Royal Court, knew what she was talking about.) But everybody i! s caught ! up in the Darwinian determinism of their world, including Rutherford pere, who has pulled his family out of the working class only to strand them in a social no man’s land.

“Hard Feelings,” which I saw a few hours after “Rutherford,” might seem to offer some relief by contrast. Its characters, one-time college chums who are sharing a big house in a transitional London neighborhood, are spoiled for choice. Every morning presents an array of decisions to make: what to wear, what clubs and restaurants to visit, who to sleep with, what drugs to take.

Such variety of alternatives is not, it seems, a recipe for happiness. One character, having “drunk myself sober” late one night, delivers a sarcastic apologia for her life, asking if she’s supposed to say she’s sorry that “our precious freedom’s made me a zombie.” She concludes nastily, “Freedom to rot, that’s all this country’s given me.”

The speaker of this diatribe is the 25-year-old Viv (Isabella Laughland), wh rules the communal roost, since she owns the place, or her rich parents do. Viv is of highly variable moods, and may or may not mean what she says. She is capricious and confused, and she can’t be held accountable for her words and actions, which include holding a visitor at knife point and putting up a camp picture of Adolf Hitler with flamingos and palm trees. So maybe she is a classist, racist, boyfriend-stealing ball of viciousness. The girl can’t help it.

The Finbrough has one of the best batting averages of any London company these days. (It gave us the rich revival of J.B. Priestley’s rarely seen “Cornelius,” which opened last month in New York as part of the Brits off Broadway festival.) Which is all the more impressive, when you consider its productions are staged in an attic-like, second-floor space over a former pub. For “Hard Feelings,” designed by Stephanie Williams, that space has been arranged to seat roughly 50 theatergoers, who are planted right on top of the hedonistic action.

My clothes stank of ersatz pot and cigarette smoke afterward, and my ears still rang with the vintage sounds of Soft Cell and Lou Reed. More important, though, I had felt I had been living as a housemate of people who were aimless, intense and susceptible to anyone willing to assume command. Those sirens and unruly crowd noises from outside (the sound design is by Tom Meehan) only underscored the tension inside.

Do thoughts of the Weimar Republic come to mind? I mean, there is that picture of Hitler. Mr. Lucie, thankfully, doesn’t require that we infer parallels. And though the characters include a Jewish woman (Zora Bishop) who becomes the house scapegoat and her socially activist boyfriend (Callum Turner), you never feel you’ve been handed a schematic roster oftypes.

The dynamics of “Hard Feelings” feel like the natural outcome of putting a group of uneasy young people in a shared space and waiting for their inner rats to emerge. And by the way, these little rats are just as trapped as the doomed second generation of “Rutherford and Son.” Though Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” may have been echoing in my mind when I left the Finborough, I could also hear Maurice Chevalier in “Gigi” singing, “I’m glad I’m not young anymore.”