On the face of it, Enjoy is a straightforward tale of a woman continuing to live in her slum-like back-to-back while it is rebuilt into a living museum of the past.
We find the prime mover behind the development is her estranged son, returning home as a daughter, seemingly to protect his child-like parents against a future they are clearly not ready for.
The ageing couple, convincingly played by Alison Steadman (now best known for the Braithwaites and Gavin & Stacey) and David Troughton (latterly of New Tricks fame), found they were happy discussing their lives with an interloper from the council than with each other. This included frank talk about their sex lives, disability, hopes for the future and regrets of the past.
A sudden death is treated with typical Bennett-style down-to-earth humour paving the way for a no-holds-barred sequence on the potential benefits of death – the ensemble ultimately slightly irked that death was misdiagnosed.
Many questions of life and death are tackled, such as how we don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone, whether it to cling to what we know or seek new horizons, why we delude ourselves from an obvious truth, and how we put on airs and graces only for an audience.
The characters had an audience on stage throughout, being shadowed by local authority officials, ostensibly there to observe “real life” before the terraces were bulldozed. This was a useful tool for the author, the two main characters becoming remarkably self-aware – and painfully cognisant of the truth behind the hidden lives of their two grown-up offspring.
First performed in 1980, this play ages beautifully, with the constant refrain that “we’re in the 20th century now you know” reminding us that for those re-homed to the new museum, that’s where they would stay. For ever.
