Wood-panelled bar. Mirror splashback. Threadbare carpet. This could be The Standard, The Fox or The Tote but it isn’t – it’s The Lark. This “brick and bluestone box” has seen better days. There isn’t a patron in sight – merely the septuagenarian publican, the aptly named Rose Grey, shuffling around on a walking stick – and the building is soon to be demolished. Last drinks have, definitively, been called. You can almost smell the stale beer and piss, the reek of long-ago drinking sessions and unsatisfied yearnings.
The pub – a “third place”, in the words of sociologist Ray Oldenburg, existing between home and work and offering belonging and respite – is a fitting setting for The Lark, Daniel Keene’s elegiac monodrama about memory, loss and regret. It follows last year’s powerful and moving revival of Mother, Keene’s 2015 play about an unhoused woman named Christie, and reprises the same creative team, namely director Matt Scholten and actor Noni Hazlehurst (for whom both parts were written). Both evince Keene’s predilection for the melancholic and existentialist and are shot through with his recognisable blend of lyricism and old-fashioned ockerisms.
