In a Dark Dark House is yet another play on the topic of childhood sexual abuse, but since it is by the provocative Neil LaBute, it can be expected to say some new things on the subject. Two brothers who rarely see one another, and who have had very different sorts of success, careers and personal lives, talk in the grounds of a rehab centre, where the younger brother, Drew (Steven Mackintosh) has asked his older brother Terry (David Morrissey) to meet him. It soon transpires that Drew wants his brother's testimony to the sexual shiftiness of a figure from their childhood who (Drew for the first time reveals) sexually abused him. Terry wonders whether this abuse allegation isn't rather 'convenient' as an extenuating circumstance in the courtcase defence for Drew's drink-driving charge, and the audience too is immediately suspicious as to Drew's trustworthiness and alert to Terry's agitation about this dredging up of the past. Cue one of those truth-unravelling, legacy-of-the-past dramas, but LaBute, who apparently was himself abused as a child, seems to be makng a few tough comments on how dangerously easy it is for the victims of sexual and physical abuse in childhood to play the victim card.
       Charming, self-pitying, easily-emoting Drew (superbly played by Steven Mackintosh) speaks in corny conventionally teenage slang ('dude', 'man', 'bro', 'whatever!') as if, comments his elder brother, he's playing a hip adolescent in an episode of some 'bad TV show'. 'Grownups don't use words like that - not if we can help it anyway', says Terry, but David Morrissey, in a stupendously moving and disturbing performance, shows how tenuously he himself feels part of that adult 'we'. Morrissey brilliantly portrays a damaged, frightened but conscientious man who was horribly beaten and bullied by his father, and for whom in fact an affectionate paedophile was almost a saviour. But, despite what has happened to him, Terry manages to be (as each of the other characters point out) a good man. 'People don't have to do anything,' he says in response to his brother's self-pity. 'Not at all - live, die, breathe, OK, but other than that, you don't got to do much of anything else...'.
       This stern insistence on free will seems characteristic of someone with a religious background (LaBute was brought up a Mormon, although he has rejected Mormonism) but actually it exhibits the best product of religion - being tough on yourself, examining your conscience, refusing to see yourself as a pawn of genes and upbringing, or to use them as an excuse. The play in no way diminishes the horror of what has been done to Terry, demands compassion for him - his whole life, strained in constant vigilance to ensure that he himself never surrenders to the dark urges he dreads, is ruined. Although he guiltily disclaims the imputation of goodness, it is thanks to his barely-won restraint that he manages not to perpetuate the damage done to him. Of course one of the sources of his abysmal guilt is that he himself was complicit in his own abuse, just as, it turns out, his once-abuser's 15 year-old daughter herself invites adult sexual advances. Kira Sternbach in a disturbingly convincing performance is in a horribly literal sense 'asking for it', and of course she too has almost certainly fallen prey to her father. Without in any way condoning paedophiles or condemning precocious children, LaBute manages to show the grim cycle of abuse for what it is.
Jane O'Grady