Good People review, Hampstead Theatre

Imelda Staunton is a pocket exocet blasting life through David Lindsay-Abaire's new play,  Good People. As Margie, a tiny, working-class Irish American from the projects of South Boston, Staunton seamlessly moves from moments of pure despair to hilarious ingenuity and vicious truth-telling.  Good People starts with Margie getting the sack. It's a fabulous scene in which her urban braggadocio dissolves into plaintive begging: she supports a disabled adult daughter and it is the erratic time-keeping of the carer - who's doing it for $50 a week - that has created the problem.

Margie's friend Jean suggests asking an old flame, Mike, for help. Mike is 'lace curtain Irish' meaning he's crossed the tracks without looking back after being pushed by his parents to study and go to medical college. A fertility specialist with a large consultancy, he has two secretaries, a house on the hill and marriage problems. When Margie arrives at the door, a simple exchange about employment opportunities becomes a turf war in which truth and lies blur and notions of community, duty, and 'niceness', are tested. Good People is alive with, and to, the complexities of human behaviour and nobody here is wholly good or bad. Every act of kindness or cruelty is dependent on the nature of the interactions preceding that moment. When cornered the last thing on our minds is ethics or morality: we fight for survival in our man-made jungles, and we fight dirty.

In recent times Hampstead Theatre has relied on big names to carry trite offerings on its main stage. Good People is a return to form. Staunton's role is anything but trite. Whither ethics, whither morality, when you're struggling to breathe? Mike lists his struggles. Margie's never known anything else. Does his assertion that she had choices count, if the choices on offer were simply different shades of shit? Lloyd Owen is an effective slow-burn Mike. The three women - Lorraine Ashbourne as Jean, June Watson as Dottie, and Angel Coulby as Mike's wife, are terrific. So too is Matthew Barker as Margie's boss.

In conclusion: There is no certainty in  Good People yet it feels complete. The set is the best since Jacob Lenz and Chariots of Fire.  Hildegard Bechtler's atmospheric interiors and the slow revolve stage are exploited by Director, Jonathan Kent, to both differentiate the two sides of the divide, and to mix them.

References
Hampstead Theatre, Tickets
Photograph: Johan Persson

Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, London NW3 3EU.       Production ends 5 April.