Responsible Other, Hampstead Downstairs - theatre review

The worldwide success of US medical drama House gave rise to a popular T-shirt slogan. “It’s never lupus” poked fun at the diagnostic tricksiness of the show but in this fierce and compelling debut play from writer/director Melanie Spencer, it very much is lupus. The victim of this elusive and sometimes life-threatening auto-immune disease here is 15-year-old Daisy, and unfortunately there’s no Hugh Laurie on hand to find a solution in the 41st minute.

Illness dramas tend to fall into one of two camps. There’s either Hollywood-style grieving parents/cherubic children or hospital-centred action, where patients are mere foils for medical brilliance.

Spencer, who did her homework through long hours in an actual Lupus Unit, is having none of this. Instead she strips things back to a point of bracing everyday simplicity for Daisy (Alice Sykes) and her widowed father (Andy Frame). How will he find the money — and all the days off work — for the trips to London for her chemotherapy? Confined to the house as she is, how will Daisy cope with her friends embarking on all those teenage rites of passage without her?

Spencer captures with great sensitivity the way Dad and Daisy, each trapped in their own private snowglobe of fear and worry, have turned home into a permanent battlefield.

One might argue that a recently dead mother, a gravely ill teenager and a long-estranged aunt suddenly launched back into the fray is too much trauma for just one play with a single living room set but such rookie excesses — and some oddly cumbersome elisions between scenes — can be forgiven when Spencer gets much else right. The way she captures the dynamics of high-pitched youthful female friendship is exquisite.

The remarkable Sykes, whom we first encounter in the priceless outfit of a giraffe onesie and heart-shaped red sunglasses, is a wonderful repertoire of snappy disdain carefully cultivated to overlay boundless bewilderment. She’s well supported by Candassaie Liburd as ebullient friend Alice and Tricia Kelly as the socially awkward aunt. Danielle Bux, aka Mrs Gary Lineker, does a decent job in her very limited stage time as a teacher.

Until July 20 (020 7722 9301, hampsteadtheatre.com)