Nineteen Gardens
Hampstead Theatre
 

NINETEEN GARDENS at Hampstead Theatre is a beautifully constructed two-hander whose job it is to distil for a rapt audience a brutal truth about the way we live. This it achieves with clarity and acumen.

Written as her first play in English by established Polish writer and journalist Magdalena Miecznicka, the piece, at only an hour in length, takes us straight to the heart of a relationship between an established, well-to-do Englishman and an attractive young Polish woman. The latter works her socks off as a hotel cleaner. Even before the play starts, the drama of this scenario fizzes with danger and we all know the liaison is as doomed as the levelling-up policy boasted by the current government.

Even as the two characters John and Aga join each other on stage and begin their loaded dialogue, we learn that the bond between them is already played out. And, while John is still up for light flirtation, Aga – driven by poverty and need – has a more fiercely practical agenda. John, she reminds him, once breezily told her that, if there was anything she needed, she should come to him. She is now taking him at his word. 

The play’s contemporary relevance is enhanced by the fact that Aga and John are not two random individuals; instead, they are symbols of polar opposites in our world: a reflection on society as we know it. While both are married with children, John is rich with the kind of English establishment background that is unassailable; Aga on the other hand suffers the poverty of the immigrant worker, living in a council flat where her children aren’t allowed even a pet to brighten their lives, and where she is always at loggerheads with an embittered and largely estranged husband. 

Authentic details of a cleaner’s life pepper the dialogue, not least that they must always work at breakneck pace, their managers always demanding tighter and tighter timescales. From Aga we see how the hopelessness of poverty and the impossibility of escape prevent social integration and leave her, as migrant worker, like Sisyphus in the classical tale, forever rolling the heavy stone uphill. The rich, meanwhile, stand secure for, as Aga remarks to John: “... castles like yours are protected in every storm.”  

And when the cleaner engages the rich man in a power struggle and tries to outsmart him, the cards we see are already dealt and the outcome all too predictable.

Director Alice Hamilton brings us an immaculately orchestrated piece. And Sarah Beaton’s delightfully perfect white set – skilfully lit by Jamie Platt – attests to the audience that all here is clear and simply delivered, with no extraneous business to distract. This is a team who together know what they’re doing. And when Olivia Le Andersen (Aga) and David Sturzaker (John) expertly exude the chemistry together that makes believable their earlier affair – essential in a play that relies so much on words – the construction is complete. 

This is simply a defining tale for our time.

Runs until December 9. Box office: 020 7722 9301, hampsteadtheatre.com