Review: Home, I’m Darling at The Lyceum, Sheffield

The advice lists ways in which wives should strive to keep their husbands happy, from planning delicious dinners to wearing a ribbon in their hair to look ‘fresh‘ and ‘gay’ in time for his work-weary arrival home.

‘Have a drink ready for him. Speak in a low, soft, soothing voice. Allow him to relax and unwind,’ instructs the author.

‘You may have a lot of things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first.’

Did any women ever really follow these Stepford-esque pointers? Did their husbands ever really want them to? And if so what did such servitude do to the dynamics of a marriage?

Such is the premise of Home, I’m Darling, a sparklingly witty and compelling play about gender politics which – as its title suggests – takes the idea of the ideal housewife and turns it on its head.

Sheffield-born Jessica Ransom – an actress reminiscent of Keeley Hawes, best known as Morwenna in Doc Martin – plays 38-year-old Judy Martin, a modern day 1950s fan who, after taking redundancy from her job in finance, decides to turn her passion for all things midcentury into a full time existence.

She and husband Johnny – Neil McDermott, EastEnders’ Ryan Malloy – already dress the part, drive a vintage Austin, attend a festival each year called Jivestock, and have furnished their home entirely with vintage eBay finds. Why not go one step further and live the fifties lifestyle full-on?

But beyond the G Plan coffee table, geometric wallpaper, sunburst mirrors and sunshine yellow kitchen, the full skirts, heels, and immaculate just-so up-dos, Judy’s seemingly happy little bubble is about to burst.

Judy fills her days with cleaning and ironing, cheerfully decanting her milk, flour and sugar from their modern packaging into authentic 1950s bottles and tins. She takes pride in knowing – thanks to her vintage housewives’ bible How To Run Your Home – that Monday is washday and Friday baking. She serves Johnny an Old Fashioned with his slippers when he comes home from work at night, and trills with self-satisfied delight that she has the time to ‘really clean behind things’.

But she bristles when her mother, played with a natural air, if quietly, by Diane Keen from Doctors, queries what she really does all day: if catering to a husband and keeping a home spick and span qualifies as work, whether degree-educated Judy’s choices aren’t a total waste of everything she fought for on her own women’s lib protest marches.

Like nostalgia itself the play, which won a Best New Comedy Olivier Award, is a bittersweet mixture of pleasure and poignancy.

As the couple’s lives unravel, Laura Wade’s clever script questions whether feminism of the home is ever really enough, either for women themselves or for the sisterhood. Unlike most of her 1950s counterparts Judy is actively choosing to stay at home rather than go out to work - does that still qualify her as a feminist?

Johnny loves the idea initially of his shirts crisply ironed, of kitchen surfaces so sparkling you can ravage your wife on them. But when his one salary stops being enough – and he stops feeling enough – and the sparky wife he married becomes a brittle shadow of her former self, he begins to question whether it’s all just a hollow veneer.

From The Good Life to Bake Off, there’s long been fascination for nostalgia, a wistful longing for times gone by. Judy gazes around her Good Housekeeping home and describes the 1950s as a happier, simpler time, when people were nicer to one another. But were they really? Not if you were black, points out her husband’s boss. Not if you were anything but a white, heterosexual man, says her mother in one of the most powerful speeches of the play. She lived through the 50s, unlike Judy who just fantasises about them, and says they were bleak, grey, cold and cruel, a post-war era of quiet desperation and social injustice.

Nothing like the picture-perfect pastel pastiche this sparky, sometimes sad, and thought-provoking play ingeniously examines.

Home, I’m Darling is at The Lyceum, Sheffield, until Saturday.