Review of The Gathered Leaves for The Live Review, August 2025
"MOVING, LAUGH-OUT-LOUD FUNNY, AND UNFLINCHINGLY HONEST."
A review by Charlotte Mason-Mottram
The Gathered Leaves, written by Andrew Keatley and directed by Adrian Noble, is a play that manages to be both devastating and tender (I cried multiple times), often in the very same breath. Staged at Park Theatre in Finsbury Park, it captures the flawed nature of human beings with startling precision: how imperfections stretch across generations, how expectations collide with worldly progress, and how love can endure even when it is buried beneath disappointment, silence, or rage.
The action unfolds in the cosy Pennington family living room, its familiarity enveloping the audience as though we, too, are waiting for dinner to be served. The naturalism is heightened by Max Pappenheim’s sound design; birds mark the passage of day, the radio station playing current politics and affairs, a ticking clock fills uneasy silences, and off-stage action at the front door of the house feels effortlessly real. Costumes (Dick Bird) evoke the 1990s with subtle accuracy, anchoring the play in a decade of quiet upheavals.
Jonathan Hyde is superb as William, the family patriarch whose rigidity and outdated worldview tend to suffocate those around him. Pedantic and intolerant, particularly towards his autistic son, Samuel (Richard Stirling), William cannot see the irony of his own obsessive tendencies. The portrayal of autism is sensitive, grounded, and never overdone, carefully handled alongside other fraught themes like racism. Around him, the women tidy up, fetch, carry, and clean the emotional wreckage; a sharp reflection of William’s patriarchal grip.
Moments of explosive emotion punctuate the stillness. Joanne Pearce, as Olivia, shakes with such visceral rage that it ripples through the room. Elsewhere, tension builds from the smallest of provocations: a grandson switching on the television becomes a flashpoint for a household living in perpetual tiptoe in the lead up to the arrival of estranged daughter Alice and William’s birthday party.
The Gathered Leaves is moving, often laugh-out-loud funny, and unflinchingly honest. It holds up a mirror to the contradictions of family life, and in doing so, it lingers long after the play’s conclusion.