Nineteen Gardens
Hampstead Theatre
 

NINETEEN GARDENS at Hampstead Theatre is a beautifully constructed two-hander whose job it is to distil for a rapt audience a brutal truth about the way we live. This it achieves with clarity and acumen.

Written as her first play in English by established Polish writer and journalist Magdalena Miecznicka, the piece, at only an hour in length, takes us straight to the heart of a relationship between an established, well-to-do Englishman and an attractive young Polish woman. The latter works her socks off as a hotel cleaner. Even before the play starts, the drama of this scenario fizzes with danger and we all know the liaison is as doomed as the levelling-up policy boasted by the current government.

Even as the two characters John and Aga join each other on stage and begin their loaded dialogue, we learn that the bond between them is already played out. And, while John is still up for light flirtation, Aga – driven by poverty and need – has a more fiercely practical agenda. John, she reminds him, once breezily told her that, if there was anything she needed, she should come to him. She is now taking him at his word.