The House They Grew Up In review – Samantha Spiro is magnetic in humane hymn to tolerance

Optimism is a rare quality in modern drama. But, while it is something to be prized, the hopeful conclusion to Deborah Bruce’s new play doesn’t follow from the evidence. Having dealt in The Distance with the numbed isolation of a woman who abandons her family, Bruce now tackles the opposite problem of reclusive siblings weighed down by their parental past. Watchable as the play is, I couldn’t believe in its ultimate cheerfulness.

Bruce sets up the situation well, showing the middle-aged Daniel and Peppy living in their family home surrounded by the accumulated clutter of the decades: something vividly realised in Max Jones’s claustrophobic design. The sedentary, autistic Daniel spends his days compulsively recording everything in a notebook and listening to a tape recorder through headphones. Peppy, who claims to have left Cambridge to look after him, is fussily protective and obsessed with art history. But their peace is disrupted when the friendship shown towards Daniel by an eight-year-old neighbour, Ben, is misinterpreted. This heralds the arrival of the police, an angry mother, predatory property hunters and even a snooping photographer.

On the one hand, the play enters a humane plea for our tolerance of other people’s eccentricities. It is particularly good on our suspicion of any adult-and-child friendship and shows the boy Ben reacting to the police enquiries with a disdain. But, having urged us to live and let live, Bruce suggests that true happiness lies in being part of a community. That may be true. But a play that starts out by combining the oddity of Galton and Simpson’s Steptoe and Son and Ionesco’s The New Tenant, in which people are overwhelmed by objects, turns into a hymn to the benefits of social welfare.

In Jeremy Herrin’s production – a joint venture between Chichester and Headlong – the acting is first-rate. Samantha Spiro is magnetic as the scuttling, neurotic Peppy who secretly identifies both with Homer’s Penelope and La Bella Nani in a Veronese painting. Daniel Ryan is equally powerful as her brother, radiating the lumbering kindness of Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Rudi Millard, one of two boys playing Ben, is also a model of self-assurance. You can’t fault the play’s production. But, typically, Bruce ignores the consequences of unwarranted police and press suspicion of paedophilia, in order to make her point that every problem has a benign solution.

• The House They Grew Up In is at Minerva Theatre, Chichester, until 5 August. Box office: 01243 781312.