The Habits, Hampstead Theatre review - who knows what adventures await?

“The exercise of fantasy is to imagine other ways of life,” says one of the role-players during a Dungeons & Dragons marathon, because “without understanding how others might live, I ask you, how will we ever understand ourselves?” It’s a good question, and writer and director Jack Bradfield, in his enchanting new play The Habits, has a good stab at answering it.

Staged in the Hampstead Theatre’s suitably eerie underground studio space, on an in-the-round stage above which hovers a scary flying dragon, the play explores human subjects such as grief and desire in a game-playing context which emphasizes the relationship between fantasy and real life.

We are in WarBoar, Dennis’s board-game café in Bromley, and Jess, Maryn and Milo are playing Dungeons & Dragons. Deep into their heroic quest to defeat the sinister Nightmare King, it’s a time of transformations: Jess, a 16-year-old student, is the commanding Dungeon Master, while the 21-year-olds, trainee solicitor Maryn and unemployed Milo, are gender-flipped as the noble Wizard and Wren, a warrior princess. As they roll the dice and mimic the voices of their fantasy characters, their real-life relationships come into focus: they know each other because Maryn and Milo went to school together, and they knew Matt, Jess’s older brother, who suffered mental illness and committed suicide.

As Jess is coping with the grief of losing her brother, and a difficult home life, she uses a mysterious notebook of fantasy writings to power the D&D game, while 55-year-old Dennis takes a paternal interest in her mental health. The problem is that Jess seems determined to string the game out for as long as possible, because she claims it has no ending, whereas Dennis is planning to sell the café to a coffee-shop chain. Encouraging him to break from the gaming world, a place which has done him psychological harm in the past, is 50-year-old police officer Bev, his well-grounded partner. How can the tensions between Jess’s obsessive need to play for ever be reconciled with Dennis’s desire to move on?

At the centre of this brightly written, and often very funny, play is a serious question about grief. Can immersing yourself, as Jess does, in a completely fantasy scenario — linked as it is with the creative energies of the deceased — be a way of healing the hurt of brutal loss? On the one hand, Bradfield suggests that the imaginary world can be a place in which our everyday emotions, such as anger or ambition, are worked through; on the other, he also acknowledges that fantasy can be an escape from reality. And that this can be both a repression of feeling and a route through metaphor to finding new emotional stability.  

Bradfield’s writing has an appealing energy and his subject is original and thought-provoking. He clearly and crisply portrays the world of goblins, dwarves and wizards and shows how chance, here dependent on the roll of a 20-sided dice, can affect your life choices. As these everyday characters jump in and out of their alter-egos, who have Lord of the Rings-style names such as Gorthalax and Grimble, we follow them on a questing tale that begins with funny voices and ends in full-scale dressing up in fantasy costumes. If D&D is more about character than narrative, then this collection of people is both the play’s strength and its weakness.

For while Jess brings a complex set of character motivations, which are gradually uncovered, the other members of the group are equally attractive, but given less detail. A romantic moment shared by the bisexual Maryn and Milo opens a door to a story that never materializes, and the relationship of Dennis and Bev could likewise have been given more space. Maryn’s woke political views are criticized by Milo because she works for a big legal corporation, but this tension is too easily resolved. Because the play is only 90 minutes long, it successfully introduces us to a group of interesting people, but is unable to satisfy our desire to know more about them. As it stands, The Habits is great fun, but could be a taster for a longer play, or a short Netflix series.

Ed Madden’s excellent production is both entertaining and gripping, proving how acting, as well as game-playing, is a collective activity. On designer Alys Whitehead’s simple table-and-chairs set, where Laura Howard’s lighting and Max Pappenheim’s cinematic music evoke steep mountain sides and deep caverns, the actors reign supreme. Ruby Stokes powerfully suggests both the deep sadness and the compulsive energy of Jess, while Sara Hazemi and newcomer Jamie Bisping bring out the sharpness and insights of the hardworking Maryn and the less mature Milo. Offering a neat contrast, Paul Thornley and Debra Baker are convincingly down-to-earth as the older couple. The result is a funny, tender and quietly inspiring evening. I left the theatre imagining other ways of life.

• The Habits at the Hampstead Theatre 5 April
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk

• @AleksSierz