Miss Myrtle’s Garden is an emotionally resonant debut that blooms into life

In a neat little garden, three men are dancing attendance on an ageing, but still fiery Jamaican-British grandmother, her moods changeable as the summer weather. Danny James King’s richly textured new play happens on Miss Myrtle’s turf, and on her terms, too. She’s guardian of her family’s past, of the now-costly London house she bought for a pittance, and of the approval she only rarely bestows. But as her memory fades, the balance of power starts to subtly shift.

Diveen Henry draws focus with her wonderful performance as Miss Myrtle, capturing this woman’s innate dignity and fiercely funny put-downs (”your best and my best are not the same”), complicated by the emotional volatility of early dementia. One minute she’s pining after her lost cat, the next she’s fiercely barring this errant feline from her house. She needs help, that’s clear, so her uptight grandson Rudy (Michael Ahomka-Lindsay) moves in with his self-assured boyfriend Jason (Elander Moore). Soon, this shirtless queer fashion stylist is sprawled out on her lawn, an unlikely addition to Myrtle’s time capsule of a house – while closeted Rudy desperately tries to keep these two facets of his identity in balance.

However, Myrtle is distracted by romantic issues of her own. She sits out on the patio arguing and reminiscing with the ghost of her late husband, Melrose (Mensah Bediako), untroubled by this apparition that she calls a duppy (a restless spirit in Caribbean folklore). Periodically, their old friend Eddie (Gary Lilburn) wanders into their chats; once this couple was there for him in his hour of need, now he weeds Myrtle's garden and stumbles through her tangled memories, too.

Director Taio Lawson’s production is intense, bordering on overblown – long blackouts and throbbing sound design firmly underline the play’s emotional beats. Designer Khadija Raza creates a tidy circle of grass, bordered with a faintly random collection of real plants: bluebells, geraniums, hydrangeas. Perhaps this imagined garden could have done with more of an authentic flavour of the Windrush generation’s gardening practices, and the ways Caribbean migrants made incongruous palm trees spring up in south London front gardens, or cultivated herbs to recreate lost flavours of home.

Still, if the horticultural authenticity is missing, the emotions ring true. There’s something so painful and real about the way that Rudy begs his grandmother for the smallest scraps of memories of his lost father – and she harshly shuts him down, only to pour out her soul to the laconic, less-invested Jason. There's a beautifully drawn tension in Rudy and Jason’s relationship, too, as they try to shake off the final residues of shame and secrecy that cling to them. Ahomka-Lindsay and Moore have a nervy chemistry as this embattled, incompatible couple: like everyone in this play, they feel like they’ve been brought together for a brief, intense season in the sun before they scatter to the winds, forever changed.

King’s play is a complex, multi-stranded thing that doesn’t quite find a satisfying resolution. However, there are so many intense, emotionally resonant moments along the way, along with hilarious utterances from Myrtle that stop you from fully pitying this staunch matriarch. It’s his first fully staged production, and a striking one – the kind of debut that Bush Theatre excels in nurturing into blooming life.

Miss Myrtle’s Garden is on at the Bush Theatre until 12 July; tickets here