Miss Myrtle’s Garden at the Bush Theatre review: a sweet, old-fashioned meditation on secrets and affection

As a friend of mine said, “Miss Myrtle’s Garden at the Bush” sounds like a lewd euphemism or at least a sexually louche club night. In fact, Danny James King’s play proves to be a sweet, old-fashioned meditation on secrets, affection and declining economic expectations across the generations of a London Jamaican clan.

It’s led by a wintrily funny performance from Diveen Henry as the beady, disapproving Myrtle and directed with brisk economy (and an occasionally startling electronic soundscape) by the Bush’s incoming artistic director, Taio Lawson. It’s not particularly original or exciting but suffused with a gentle wit and empathy for all its characters.

We first see the long-suffering Melrose (Mensah Bediako) planting flowers under his wife Myrtle’s strict, supervising eye in the garden of her large south London house. “Your best and my best is not the same,” she reproves. Their teacher grandson Rudy (Michael Ahomka-Lindsay) appears with his stylist boyfriend Jason (Elander Moore), to look for his grandma’s missing cat. When she hears they will shortly be made homeless by a rent hike, Myrtle grudgingly offers the use of her top floor rooms, where Rudy’s father died mysteriously young.

The flamboyant Jason, all crop tops and leather shorts, is less than thrilled that he must pretend to be “just” Rudy’s flatmate and also deny his Nigerian heritage to avoid triggering Myrtle’s presumed prejudices. Drunken Irish widower Eddie (Gary Lilburn), dragooned in to help Myrtle with the gardening and with doctors’ visits, sees through this ruse immediately. But other secrets are harder to unlock, and the very nature of truth becomes less clear-cut once we realise Myrtle has dementia.

The characterisations are rarely deep: Jason’s clothes are his personality, and Eddie is a boozy, blarneying caricature prone to singing The Wild Rover. Melrose is barely sketched in, for reasons that also become clear, but the dynamic of the marriage is concisely outlined. Myrtle says that one of them had to hold it together when their son died “and you chose me”. Later he tells her she “could start a fight in a room by yourself”. There’s a very funny scene when she describes resolving an argument by dropping an iron on his foot.

However thin the characters, almost all the performances are nicely understated and laced with pleasing one-liners, and Henry’s in the lead is excellent. She dials Myrtle’s cantankerousness and her physical and mental frailty up and down as we zip back and forth between eras in her mind. She has the flat-footed hesitancy of the confused down pat. Several people in my life have had dementia, and the awful condition is sensitively handled here.

A garden isn’t a particularly novel or subtle metaphor for a family – indeed, generational attitudes, sexuality and horticulture were tied together at this theatre just four months ago in Coral Wylie’s Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew. Here, designer Khadija Raza gives us a circle of grass and floral borders with a disc of sky above. The scene changes are harsh, accompanied by blurts of Dan Balfour’s soundscape.

For all its familiarity, King’s script springs some fun surprises, particularly Myrtle and Melrose’s pragmatic attitude to death and a last-minute reversal I won’t spoil. This is undemanding but pleasing.

The Bush Theatre, to July 12; bushtheatre.co.uk