The Sleepers Den - Peter Gill

 The Sleepers Den is an early play by Gill, mounted at the Royal Court in 1965 when he was only twenty-five.   This, in the collected edition, is a revised version, again at the Royal Court, from 1969.   In both versions the lead actress was the great Eileen Atkins, and I suspect much of the revision was an expansion of her final disintegration in Act Three.

The play is indeed a vehicle for the leading actress, albeit in an extremely wretched, miserable setting.   In that sense it combines classical theatre tradition with the then modish working class, kitchen-sink model.   The life of the Shannons is crammed into a single multi-purpose room in the rundown slum housing they rent.   Mrs Joan Shannon runs the household, which consists of her brother Frankie, her daughter Maria and her elderly bedfast mother.   There is, we are told early on, no Mr Shannon and seemingly never has been.   The title of the younger Mrs Shannon, Joan, is purely honorific.   We pretend that single motherhood was a trend of the late sixties but it was in fact very common in working class communities.   We had a neighbour in that situation and one of my godmothers was the same.

Both ladies I knew just ignored any criticism and got on with it.   Joan, though, shuts out the wider world.   She does not work, partly because she feels obliged to look after her mother.   Maria is too young to work and Frankie brings in the only income.   In fact Joan keeps her mother sedated with pills and treats herself to the odd luxury via the dreaded 'club'.   Now those chickens are coming home to roost.   The 'club' has referred her to its solicitors for non-payment and the Catholic Church has sent in one of its visitors to enquire after the older Mrs Shannon.   We discover, though Joan never does, that Frankie has been working extra hours and has stashed away a the overtime wages; it's only a few pounds but it would be more than enough to clear his sister's debt.   What Frankie is saving it for we never find out.   It's one of those questions that Gill cleverly wants to leave us with.

In the end Joan barricades herself in her world-room.   She even swaps places with her mother.   Is she mad?   Or is she just vocalising her agony?   Another question audience or reader can take away with them.