The Humans, Hampstead Theatre, review: Remarkably daring production

Insecurities stalk this bitterly funny and piercingly sad play

Sarah Steele and Cassie Beck in Hall's excellent UK production of the Broadway hit (Marc Brenner)

Stephen Karam’s bitterly funny and piercingly sad play was a massive hit on Broadway, where it won four Tony Awards in 2016. Edward Hall saw it and immediately wanted to produce it – he assumed this would be with a British director and cast – at Hampstead. But he also admitted to himself that Joe Mantello’s original Broadway production could not be bettered.

We owe Hall a debt of gratitude for his modesty and daring. He seized the opportunity of the American cast reuniting for a season in Los Angeles to bring the show over, giving us the chance to marvel at its rhythmic precision and remarkably lived-in and authentic performances.

It’s Thanksgiving and three generations of the Blake family have gathered in the rather creepy basement duplex in Chinatown (excellent two-level set by David Zinn) that’s been newly rented by daughter Brigid and her older boyfriend Richard. Her parents Erik and Deirdre have made the journey from Scranton, Philadelphia, bringing with them grandma Momo who is in a wheelchair and suffering from dementia.

Also in attendance is Brigid’s older sister Aimee, who has recently been dumped by her girlfriend and is about to be pushed out of her law firm because of a chronic illness. It says a lot for Cassie Beck’s fine performance – so fluent and deft in the way it flickers between heartbreak and stoic irony – that you don’t feel the character is somewhat over-equipped in the misfortune department.

The proceedings unfold in real time over an unbroken 90 minutes. The cast brilliantly animates the crosstalk of this assertive lower-middle-class clan who are caught in conditions of slightly forced, camping-out jollity (paper plates and cups because the real things haven’t yet arrived). It’s very astute about what happens when working-class parents spend time with their better-educated offspring. Erik and Deirdre are nonplussed as to why Sarah Steele’s Brigid prefers big-city life, has clocked up crippling students debts and does not regard a statue of the Blessed Virgin as the most welcome of flat-warming gifts.

There are some particularly illuminating exchanges between Erik and Richard whose peacemaking good manners and faintly condescending air of privilege are nicely captured by Arian Moayed. Erik struggles to imagine what it would be like to depressed with a trust fund. When Richard says that he had to take some time off to “reboot” his life, Erik’s response is: “I dunno. Doing life twice sounds like the only thing worse than doing it once.”

Insecurities stalk the play. After 28 years of labouring in maintenance at a girls’ private school, Erik now faces an uncertain future. His wife, an office manager, takes orders from bosses a fraction of her age who are all vastly better paid. Reed Birney and Jayne Houdyshell are superlative as this couple. She’s a loving, spunky, resourceful mother who tries to brush off the hurt when she overhears her daughters mocking her for emailing “interesting” articles to them as a way of keeping in touch. It’s as if Birney’s Erik is disintegrating inside as he contemplates, with quietly harrowed disbelief, the unanticipated twists that have taken his life far from the American Dream.

These insecurities seem to let loose forces that gradually amass and draw us into a world of horror. From the start, there are unnerving thuds supposedly made by the elderly Chinese woman who lives in the apartment upstairs. Such touches intensify in the way they bridge the ordinary and the uncanny. Lights falter and fuse. LED lanterns are whisked around. There’s the encroachment of complete darkness which Erik has to make a stand.

You realise why the piece is called The Humans. Richard, a fan of comic books, had said that the monsters in them tell each other scary stories about humans. For me, though, the scariness of this side of the story is not particularly coherent (the final moment is, to my mind, pure schlock. More emotionally powerful, by far, is the reading out of the devastating email – lucid, brave, frank – sent to her granddaughters by Momo (Lauren Klein) when she realised she would soon be lost to dementia. Fervently recommended.

To 13 October, hampsteadtheatre.com