We watch old movies. We read old novels. So why shouldn’t we occasionally see old plays? That clearly is the belief of director Tricia Thorns and producer Graham Cowley whose Two’s Company has brought us, over the past 20 years, neglected work by Ernest Hemingway, James Saunders and NC Hunter among many others. This month they will be reviving, at London’s Arcola theatre, Don’t Destroy Me by Michael Hastings which created headlines when first seen in 1956 but which has since fallen into oblivion.
The main reason for the feeding frenzy in 1956 was that Hastings was only 18 and that his play opened a few months after Look Back in Anger had sparked the so-called Royal Court revolution. All the youth of England, if you believed the popular press, was on fire and Don’t Destroy Me was emphatically a young man’s play. It dealt with the travails of a Jewish teenager, Sammy, who after the death of his mother had been sent to live with an aunt in Croydon but who now found himself reunited with his drunken dad in a Brixton tenement. A lack of communication between the generations loomed large but the play’s energy sprang from its vivid portrait of a rackety community: best of all was a scene where a rabbi came to call, at Sammy’s behest, and was fed and fawned over before being finally expelled.
