The Clean House

Sarah Ruhl’s play is a witty American domestic comedy about housework and different loves lost and gained. Its occasional leaps into metaphors and magic realism are challenging to get right.  A workaholic doctor, Lane, sacks her Brazilian cleaning lady, Matilda – an aspiring stand-up comedian  who hates cleaning – just as her breast surgeon husband cuts open and falls in love with his patient.

The Clean House leaps into action, earlier, when Lane’s contrasting sister, Virginia, clean-obsessed and under-employed, begs Matilda to let her do Matilda’s work on the sly.  While Keila Terencio does much comic flagging as Matilda, Alice Livingstone wins the real laughter and empathy as the depressive Virginia. 

James Bean and Colleen Clark are convincing as the surgeon and his dying patient, mature age but aflame with new love.  Their doubling as Matilda's deceased parents back in Brazil, a couple in love with jokes and laughter, is a mirage less successfully realised.  With Mary-Anne Halpin getting real with Lane’s exasperation, this is an accomplished cast. 

Director Rosane McNamara midway though lets them run off the rails when the acting turns broad, and details of truth, changed relationships and key turning points are fudged.  The play too becomes more fragmentary as we are swept to the benign conclusion of sisters reborn, jealousies and controls swept away by impending death and cultural and class differences forgotten.

David Marshall-Martin’s handsome set is arguably too literal for this play’s abstractions, and his lighting little aid to the magical.  It's all an amusing, sometimes tender journey at the New but The Clean House remains a challenge.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Bob Seary