Miss Myrtle’s Garden. Bush Theatre.

The Bush Theatre’s new artistic director, Taio Lawson, launches the venue’s latest season of productions with a confident, warm-hearted, slow-burning reflection on the burden of secrets and unreconciled memories. Not a great deal happens in Danny James King’s Mrs Myrtle’s Garden, but its emotional heft and subtle insight impress immensely.

“I’m going out to come back”, the crochety, elderly Miss Myrtle (Diveen Henry) tells her ghostly gardening companion Melrose (Mensah Bediako, wistful, understated and underused). She is talking about stepping out briefly for a spot of shopping in Peckham. She could equally be talking about stepping back in time to disinter, consider, and then rebury painful recollections.

Except soon, Miss Myrtle’s memories of a son lost to cancer, a husband she cannot bring herself to forgive, and a secret she has kept from her grandson will stop coming back. Incipient cognitive decline is robbing Miss Myrtle (or simply Myrtle to her family) of her identity and past. Before that happens, there are visiting duppies, Jamaican Patois for malevolent spirits that return to haunt or trouble the living, that she needs to confront and exorcise. “I don’t visit the past. The past visits me,” she tells us. And Miss Myrtle is running out of time. James King has a sharp, unflinching eye for the slow brutalities of dementia, not just on those living with it, but also on their loved ones.

Miss Myrtle’s grandson Rudy (Michael Ahomka-Lindsay) has a burdensome secret, too. Specifically, he is telling anyone who will listen that that hunky Jason (a sparkly Elander Moore), who has moved into Miss Myrtle’s house, is his buddy rather than his boyfriend. Ageing Irish alcoholic neighbour and family friend Eddie (Gary Lilburn thankfully reels back any temptation to ‘Oirish’ the part) is having none of it. “How long have you two been together?” he asks politely of a mortified Rudy. “Have you stopped to think why you keep putting yourself in situations where you can’t be yourself?” fashion stylist Jason, weary of the pretence, enquires rather more assertively.

James King’s narrative, such as it is, unfolds at a pace bordering on languid over a few months in Miss Myrtle’s garden (designer Khadija Raza’s circular lawn set, brilliantly lit by Joshua Gadsby, cleverly evokes the changing seasons). The garden plants, planted in spring and carefully watered, bloom into a colourful rainbow by summer. One supposes there is a metaphor here for Jason and Rudy’s relationship, or at least the potential the relationship has if only school-teacher Rudy would rid himself of his visceral internalised homophobia. Secrets, like weeds, tend to emerge at unexpected times. When their time comes, flowers wilt and fade, which one presumes is a metaphor for Miss Myrtle’s fate.

The chemistry between Ahomka-Lindsay’s frumpy, buttoned-up Rudy and Moore’s ditzy fashionista Jason is great (Raza has immense fun with the lad’s eccentric costumes), though one wonders whether this relationship would survive for long outside of the dramatic space.  Really, though, this is Henry’s evening. Her caustic, grumpy Miss Myrtle is both richly nuanced and entirely credible.

Lawson’s understated direction sits perfectly with the tone of Mrs Myrtle’s Garden, making space for James King’s gently witty dialogue to air. Sound Designer Dan Balfour’s jarring urban soundscape during scene transitions delivers a pithy counterpoint to the quiet tranquillity of the garden.

Writer:   Danny James King

Director:    Taio Lawson