Michael Billington and Alfred Hickling 

Twisted family life at Hampstead Theatre

Buried AliveHampstead Theatre London**
  
  


"Only connect", wrote EM Forster. And in Buried Alive Philip Osment seeks to forge connections between past and present, domestic tragedy and professional ethics. But while Osment, as evinced by his earlier plays such The Dearly Beloved and Flesh and Blood, writes excellently about family life, I here found myself doubting the assumed links between private and public worlds.

Osment's play takes the form of a detective story. The black, ambitious Ammy is writing a newspaper profile of Stewart, a reclusive, award-winning photo-journalist hiding away in Suffolk with his teenage Brazilian son. Sensing something murky in Stewart's past, Ammy pursues her investigations to his native Edinburgh, where she just happens to be giving a talk on the portrayal in the media of developing countries. Through flashbacks to the late 1970s and Stewart's home life with his two sisters, ferociously religious mother and supposedly mad dad we gradually discover the nature of the private tragedy that has determined Stewart's career.

And there's the rub. Osment provides a chillingly plausible account of a puritanical Scottish matriarchy where all pleasure is punished and where daughter Kate is locked in a cellar once it is discovered she is pregnant; Veronica Roberts is particularly good as the vindictive mother who brandishes a semen-stained towel in front of her teenage son.

What I find facile is Osment's assumption that Stewart's obsession with third-world victims is shaped by the disaster that has overtaken his family. I suspect people become photo-journalists for many reasons: curiosity, ambition, altruism, an appetite for danger. There is something reductive about the idea that they are simply working out their problems by identifying with their subjects. And even the extract we hear from Ammy's Edinburgh lecture, arguing that images of suffering are absorbed by a consumerist culture, never asks the obvious question: isn't all information a source of light and hasn't tyranny, in Europe as well as in developing countries, been exposed by the probing lens of the camera?

I wouldn't deny that Osment writes well about family cruelties or that Mike Alfreds's production is acted with scrupulous truth. Paul Higgins as the haunted photographer, Jane Arnfield and Louise Bush as his sisters, John Ramm as their abusive uncle and Michelle Joseph as the journalist are all first-rate. But to suggest, as Osment does, that public postures are the result of private derangements is to fall for the oldest of reactionary canards.

• Until May 19. Box office: 020-7722 9301.

 

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