Kill Thy Neighbour review – dark secrets of the only family left in the village

Theatr Clwyd, Mold
Lucie Lovatt’s elaborate comedy exploring the housing crisis in rural Wales is provocative and conceptually ambitious yet still pleasingly entertaining

Caryl and Meirion seem to be the only ones left in the coastal Pembrokeshire village of Porth y Graith. All the other houses, still referred to by the surnames of departed families, have been sold as second homes and holiday lets and rumoured Senedd legislation might force the couple to also sell-up, allowing them the freedom to move closer to bus routes, hospitals and pubs that aren’t only open during the summer season.

In several respects, Lucie Lovatt’s play is a provocative and ambitious dramatic proposition. Elaborately plotted and directed at a swift pace by Chelsey Gillard on Elin Steele’s living room set, it refrains from being a polemic even if the outsider characters, Bristolian Max (Gus Gordon) and estate agent Gareth (Jamie Redford) sometimes appear as convenient plot ciphers. But the comedy is often a little too genteel to sustain the darker turns of the narrative. Momentum is maintained by revealing successive family secrets, the outcomes of which are sometimes tonally at odds with the need to reach for the jocular or a tidy resolution.

But the cast do well with these clashes, especially the female characters. As Caryl, Victoria John is given greater opportunity to traverse such changes, especially in moments where the dramatic register segues into more elegiac meditations. A force of nature, she is effectively counterbalanced by the placidness of Dafydd Emyr’s Meirion. As their daughter Seren, Catrin Stewart deftly and persuasively carries some of the narrative’s more unexpected plot twists.

It’s pleasingly entertaining, and there is much to be said for the manner in which Lovatt’s script centres an issue that is seldom explored in English-language Welsh theatre. It directly addresses the housing crisis in rural Wales, making clear how entire communities have been hollowed out for the benefit of tourism, and the often insidious ways in which local populations are sometimes left little option but to be complicit in such shifts. Even if its incongruent tonal threads don’t quite cohere, one can’t but help admire the conceptual and thematic ambition.

• At Theatr Clwyd, Mold, until 20 April, then Torch Theatre, Milford Haven, from 24 April to 4 May

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