In 1979 England, 19 pounds (about $31 U.S.) a week rents a petrol-station cashier an SRO with a calico curtain hanging below the sink, a folding tray doubling as a liquor table, a kitchen chair for seating guests, and a bed pushed against the bricked-up fireplace. This being the outskirts of London, the residents also enjoy such post-WWII amenities as coin-meter electricity, a bathroom down the hall with an audible dripping pipe and a pay telephone on the sidewalk outside. Single woman Jean claims to like her apartment's cozy low-maintenance squalor, but the nearly bare refrigerator and the empty beer bottles scattered among the furnishings reflects likewise empty off-duty hours devoted to peripatetic sex with unreliable partners.
Mike Leigh's Ecstasy covers a long Friday, beginning when Jean, on the advice of her ever-optimistic chum (appropriately named Dawn), attempts to discard her most recent booty call. Their ambivalent tryst is interrupted, though—first, by the aforementioned Dawn, then by the would-be philanderer's irate wife, setting off a brawl that ends in damage to Jean's bed. That evening, the always-capable Dawn returns, accompanied by her amiably vulgar husband Mick and his shy homey Len, who repair the breakage with cheerful alacrity, after which the friends celebrate their success by embarking on an evening of hooch, tobacco and camaraderie.
"And that's all???" audiences may protest, confronted by a literary genre popular among playwrights in the United Kingdom, but less so in the United States. Our country's social mobility might have rendered everyday portraits of the working classes unnecessary, but as the four comrades listen to Elvis records, sing songs both solemn and bawdy, and recall their high school days with the nostalgia of much-older adults, perceptive playgoers may sense the bleakness underlying their rowdy revels.
In a universe where the future offers small promise of significant change, Jean's decision to accept the attentions of a good man over her long string of bad ones, represents a turning point commensurate with far more cataclysmic resolutions.
The Cole Theater ensemble, making its debut under the direction of Shade Murray, immerses us in the microcosmic environment of our characters (which occasionally encompasses a casual racist remark or juvenile toilet joke), their scene-study expertise crafting from Leigh's minimalist dialogue and heavy regional accents a history steeped in fierce loyalty that all but shimmers with the defiance of hardscrabble innocents determined to be happy despite their restricted choices. At the conclusion of the visit, we might still be glad we aren't them, but we don't regret a single moment spent in their company.
