The curtains open on a beautiful 1950’s housewife, Judy, a slight woman with immaculately curled hair and starched pink floral pinafore, a coordinated outfit that is almost perfectly reflected in the creamy buttercup yellows of the kitchen behind her. She is placed in a wider set displaying the interior of a home that could have come straight out of a ‘50s homemaking magazine, with corresponding matching curtains and enamel fridges. Having made her husband, Jonny, a breakfast cooked to perfection and waved him out of the door, Judy contentedly removes her apron, folds the newspaper, and whips out a laptop from underneath the kitchen table. Home, I’m Darling is a precise exploration of gender politics, nostalgia and escapism, presenting the unsolvable questions of the gender power balance and the underlying psychological effects of fantasy in a visceral, absorbing play. Set in the 21 st century, it details the life of Judy, played by Katherine Parkinson, a woman who to...
‘ The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.’ In the powerful first line of Milkman, Anna Burns introduces the absurd, urgent and deeply provocative tone of the novel. Winner of the Man Booker Prize, this novel is one of the masterpieces of our age, combining the gang violence of Ireland’s troubled past with a terrifying presentation of an overbearing collective city consciousness. It seems dystopian in its bleakness and horror, and it transcends time in its haunting vagueness. The story follows middle sister, living in an unnamed city with her family. Controlled by police, renouncers and miscellaneous paramilitary, to be noticed is to be in immediate danger. When Milkman starts appearing outside her work, house and French classes, her carefully muted, cultivated persona falls apart. Intricately structured, Burns’ narrative takes the reader on a gripping explorati...