Three Pay Days – check your privilege and then wake up to your vulnerability (Kabosh Theatre)

Three Pay Days premiered in the Sanctuary Theatre last night. Alice Malseed’s new play captures the outcomes of the systemic failure of the housing sector in Northern Ireland (and so many other regions) through the lives of Anna and Stevie.

When Anna loses her partner, her home and her job, she also loses grip of any sense of financial security and wellbeing. She returns home with her pre-school daughter to live with her parents and enters a battle with benefits bureaucracies and fastidious gatekeepers of what meagre support is available. The private rental market is more competitive than the Olympics, and it’s a cutthroat business to secure an over-priced and underwhelming property.

Meanwhile, Stevie is caring for his Dad. They are both victims of the working-class low life expectancy statistics. Scraping a living by carrying out odd jobs and basic repairs in properties owned by a ‘slum landlord’, Stevie is always chasing unpaid invoices from wealthier clients.

Holly Hannaway looks forlorn as she tells Anna’s central story. There is little to be joyful about when the pitch is tilted and you’re running uphill towards the goal of security that is getting ever further away. Patrick McBrearty brings a sense of resignation to Stevie’s attitude towards his circumstances. Pulling a tie around his neck, he swaps from handyman to a series of estate agents all but one of whom has had all empathy sucked out of them.

The final cast member, Mary Moulds, plays Anna’s boss – a café-owner who needs to keep an eye on her profits by minding the pennies, and by keeping an inherited property as a Airbnb money-spinner – and Anna’s unregistered landlord.

The success of Malseed’s script and Paula McFetridge’s direction is to rarely allow any character to be fully hero or anti-hero. You’ll sometimes have sympathy for Anna’s boss who veers between kind and stingy, but offers semi-reasonable excuses for her capitalist profiteering and sneers at even richer friends who overspend on wine. There’s even a moment (spoiler: short-lived!) of optimism as she agrees to offer hungry children free breakfasts. The complex circle of blame is what illuminates the systemic problems at the heart of Anna and Stevie’s woes.

The period of oscillation between Anna and Stevie’s contributions decreases as the play’s internal pendulum races towards the conclusion. Katie Richardson’s soundtrack loses its initial playfulness and draws the audience into the dark sense of depression. Earlier in the play, new properties being viewed were greeted with a coin sound effect. Now the phone calls are accompanied with a distorting ring tone that lingers like a banshee screaming into what’s left of Anna’s soul.

The final scenes remind the audience of the tension between state failures and society picking up the slack to support people in financial and nutritional poverty. Malseed paints a realistically bleak picture. There is close to no hope. It’s clear that local foodbanks and churches offering meals and energy credit are mere sticking plasters plugging a massive hole in a burst dam. Money worries quickly turn into heath worries. Both Anna and Stevie ultimately lose dignity as they deal with their distress. No one is handing out dignity tokens.

Over 70 minutes, Three Pay Days hits its audience in the gut. There’s shock. Followed by sympathy. And then a feeling of being scared as we begin to check our privilege and then realise that so many of us are vulnerable to this happening to each of us if certain levers of stability were to be pulled hard and fast.

A BBC report this morning on homelessness charity the Welcome Organisation in Belfast includes a couple, Amanda and Robert, who “missed two payments on their rent and were made homeless. They spent three weeks in temporary accommodation, but are now living on the streets after that fell through.” The report goes on to explain that the couple have recently been robbed and “their last remaining possessions were gone”. “I am broken, I cannot believe someone would do this to us … “I don’t feel safe anymore” says Amanda.

Alice Malseed follows in the footsteps of playwrights like Fionnuala Kennedy and Louise Mathews in documenting injustice and giving voice to people whose daily struggles are normally just statistics in departmental reports and ministerial statements. There’s no sweeping the housing crisis under the carpet. The NI Housing Executive recently explained that cuts in government funding mean that only 400 new social homes would be built in 2024-25 rather than the target of 2,000. (Those figures are dwarfed by the new UK Government’s ambition of “[helping] deliver 1.5 million homes over the next five years”.)

Performed on Wednesday evening as part of East Side Arts Festival, you can catch Three Pay Days on Friday 2 August in The Felons as part of Féile an Phobail, and on Saturday 3 in The Playhouse, Derry. Full details and links to get tickets on the Kabosh Theatre website.

Photo credit: Johnny Frazer

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