Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. In the past decade, a booming vintage industry and a fetishisation of cake baking has shown that we are all too willing to immerse ourselves in a past that never really existed. What seems like a twee trend, however, is shown to be papering over our insecurities about the present in Home, I’m Darling, Laura Wade’s slick and very enjoyable play which has transferred to the West End following sell-out runs at Theatr Clwyd and the National Theatre.
Judy (Katherine Parkinson) lives in an ersatz Fifties paradise with her husband Johnny (Richard Harrington) in deepest suburbia. She wears voluminous tea dresses, makes cheese straws and devilled eggs and plays wifey to perfection day-in, day-out, while he, though compliant, goes out to work in the real world as an estate agent. She learns her craft through a “bible” that she found on the internet, Kay Smallshaw’s How to Run Your Home Without Help.
Judy’s obsessive time-travelling bemuses her friends, Fran and Marcus (Siubhan Harrison and Hywel Morgan), part-time rockabillies who embrace the style, but precious little else. It also provokes a withering response from her mother, Sylvia (Susan Brown), an old-school feminist who brought up her daughter in an alternative community once her marriage had broken down, a move which may have prompted Judy’s desire to retreat into Doris Day land.