It's hard to imagine being shocked, as 1956 audiences reportedly were, by the play's grubby realism and violent brutality; we've had far too much of that in the ensuing decades to be surprised by much of anything now. But what does still shock is the mix of cruelty, lust, fury, and grief that propels Osborne's characters together and apart. It's not surprising; it's just startling in its complexity, contradictoriness, and raw power. In a word, shocking. Like touching a live wire.
Part of what makes Orfeo's production work is that its limitations become strengths. The tiny, cramped, muggy space of the Factory Theatre intensifies the claustrophobia of the play's setting, a dingy attic flat in England's industrial Midlands. Cristina Todesco's artfully cluttered set is clearly furnished with cheap castoffs, just as the actual flat would be. And, with only 45 seats, the theater puts the audience right in this grungy room with Jimmy, the aforesaid angry young man, and with his timid wife, their meek lodger, and the brittle upper-class friend whose arrival is the match to their tinder.
But the greatest strength of this staging is its blazingly talented young cast. As Jimmy, Daniel Berger-Jones broods and storms with a barely contained ferocity that's more frightening to watch than a completely unleashed performance would be; the unseen chains that bind him only underscore the furious strength that strains against them. He's a caged ogre, looming all the larger for the tininess of his lair.
Liz Hayes has a less showy but no less demanding role as Alison, Jimmy's meek wife and favorite target. Osborne makes it almost impossible, at least at first, to understand why any woman would stay with such a man, but Hayes gives Alison a sense of inwardness and reserve that let us see her retreating into herself whenever his attacks grow too much to bear.
