Home, I'm Darling Tickets

Have you ever wondered what happens when vintage becomes vindictive? In Laura Wade’s masterful new play “Home, I’m Darling,” audiences discover the dark side of the throwback. The searing and timely production ran at the National Theatre to enthusiastic critical success, and now, enjoys a West End premiere at the Duke of York’s Theatre. Katherine Parkinson (of the cult classic “The IT Crowd”) expertly portrays Judy, the scrupulous housewife who creates a perfectly quaffed 1950s fantasy all around her, complete with poodle skirts and a home splashed with the garish colours of a bygone era.

Underneath the awe-striking attention to detail to achieve the perfect retro lifestyle (credited to Judy in the play, but to director Tamara Harvey and the production team in reality), Wade’s new work is a clever and complex dissection of feminism, forcing the audience to consider how far the woman’s right to choose can stretch before reversing back on itself.

What to watch for

The pressures of maintaining a perfect household in the 1950s, including constant cooking, cleaning, caring for the children, all while retaining perfect makeup and hair, led some women to dose themselves with barbiturates like Valium or other sedatives. At the time, this type of drug was dubbed “"mother's little helper."

In addition to “Home, I’m Darling,” Laura Wade also has a play adapted from an unfinished work of Jane Austen. The play will open in Chichester.

Part of Wade’s inspiration for “Home, I’m Darling” came from a trend she noticed in the rise of the fetishisation of domesticity. She told “The Guardian,” “Things like ‘Bake Off’ were just starting to bubble up, and that cupcake culture seemed to be in the ascendant. There was something comforting about those nostalgic ideas of home life and I was curious why people needed that.”