The London housing crisis has already inspired one of the best shows of the last year, Sh!t Theatre’s extremely funny live art piece ‘Letters to Windsor House’.
Up-and-coming-writer Matt Hartley’s ‘Deposit’ is a more sombre affair, and probably warrants some sort of trigger warning for anybody who has ever found themselves staring into the abyss after throwing their pay-check in there to cover rent on a room essentially unfit for human habitation. So pretty much anybody young-ish who lives in London, really, though it's possible some of the Hampstead Theatre regulars might find it an eye-opener.
Ben (Ben Addis) and Rachel (Natalie Dew) are a couple, as are Sam (Karl Davies) and Melanie (Nicola Kavanagh). Rachel and Melanie are best friends of some 15 years. Even though they’re all in their thirties and Sam works as a doctor, none of them has the readies for a mortgage deposit in London’s feral housing market. So they decide to live together in a one-bed flat for one year precisely while they save up deposit money, halving the rent by converting the living room into an illicit second bedroom.
Though there’s a few funny lines, Hartley doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and to a large extent the play’s strength is in accurately and horribly capturing the sense of hopelessness that comes with attempting to negotiate a broken system, and the sense of failure at not owning your own home at an age when your parents did. In particular, lower earning Ben and Rachel put themselves though shit, denying all hopes of a holiday or a night out for the sake of scraping together just £10,000 – a tidy sum, but effectively useless for buying a flat. Lisa Spirling’s production is grim and claustrophobic, with only some energetic movement sequences between scenes to cut through the gloom.
If the situation rings true, the characters often don’t – especially Davies’s improbably emotionless Sam. The strains that develop on their relationships seem less to do with their situation, more to do with the fact they’re not very nice people. When the play concludes with one couple staying together and another splitting, it’s hard to feel very invested. There is also a slight frustration that the play might have felt even more zeitgesity when it premiered at Hampstead's Downstairs theatre in 2015, but it's only on this return that press are allowed to review, as per the theatre's eccentric policy.
But the situation still rings true, and if ‘Deposit’ has its faults, it also feels like a very necessary piece of writing.