Three Days Pay, Alice Malseed’s new play for Kabosh, is more polemic than drama. Hard hitting and depressing in its accurate analysis of the way society is unfairly divided into the haves and have-nots, its documentary style means you get the message upfront. The story of Anna, the mother whose loss of a partner leaves her with no option but to take her wee girl (never named, underlining the universality of the plot) back home to her parents, is presented factually. Here, in a two bed property, also accommodating a brother, they occupy a single bedroom which eventually leads to questions from the social services. This is an angry piece, presented largely in monologues with no plea for sympathy but a tough look at where we are now. As Anna, our straight talking single parent, Holly Hannaway is quick to argue her corner, sussed but ultimately doomed to fail by the system. The truthfulness of the detail suggests real people must have been involved in the research.
I was reminded of American muck raking literature like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Yet the difference is the immigrant workers then were fed an impossible dream via advertising, the characters here, Anna and Stevie (excellent Patrick McBrearty who played all the men ) and co were trying to cope with a genuine nightmare. The set indicated the problem in our property market. On the left were appealing For Sale signs, tempting to those with deposits for mortgages and would be landlords. On the right we saw universal credit publicity and details of inadequate benefits. Of course, as somebody observes, There’s no such thing as a good landlord. Mary Moulds was nicely smug as two of the species. Nor were there many good estate agents, with representatives of the breed happily showing fifteen or so people round overpriced, often unappealing, properties in the knowledge that some of the applicants hadn’t a hope in hell or indeed the Ravenhill of securing a place to live.
The varieties of homelessness here included Stevie’s time in a mate’s garage and Anna’s brief period sofa surfing. with the final return to the parental home having a grim inevitability. Need it be like this? No, yet as charities pick up the slack, there has been little political will of late to tackle the housing crisis with homelessness figures increasing exponentially in urban areas. Yet change is possible if awareness is increased by pieces like this. And if we all want it.
The sound of ker-ching, a coin dropping, acted as an aural leitmotif, directing was brisk by Paula McFestridge. The sense of despair carried on into a wet night.
Jane Hardy
Three Days Pay continues at Feile an Phobail on August 2, and the Playhouse, Derry, on August 3.
