There are expectations that accompany a Royal Court transfer to the West End. We expect something a bit controversial, a bit ground-breaking – in line with Clybourne Park, Jerusalem and possibly even Posh. We’re are offered a sitcom here instead with a live studio audience in the stalls and eruptions of over-loud pop music taking the place of canned laughter.
That the middle-aged woman drinks a lot of white wine can surely only be funny once. Likewise, that her teenage daughter, Tilly – who is impossibly one dimensional – swears a lot and is painfully rude to her mother gets a bit repetitive after a couple of hours. The laughs are unearned and grudgingly given. Despite the track record of director Nina Raine and writer April De Angelis, the timing and direction seem constantly off; crucial lines dissolve as soon as they are spoken and the expected tension fails to materialise.
Tamsin Greig is easy to watch and her enactment of Hilary’s uncertainty about how to behave in the modern world as a mother, wife, friend does have touches of poignancy, but the audience is never given a chance to read between the lines: every moment of genuine feeling is rolled out like a bog roll with a pack of puppies sent bouncing after it.
There is, however, a lovely tableaux of liberal parenting where Hilary and husband Mark lie in bed listening in terror to the sound of their daughter having sex: their terror is not that they might hear something, but that they don’t know how to react if they do. They compare the situation to their own upbringing and are suddenly at a loss to explain or cope with this enormous shift in expectations.
It is their daughter’s sexual relationships that bring the couple into contact with Bea and Roland. Amanda Root has some good lines and Richard Lintern is also funny, yet while observations are well delivered, they are neither new nor revealing. Doon Mackichan’s portrayal of Hilary’s best friend Frances, on the other hand, is almost unbearable. Is it meant to be? She has one note and she plays it relentlessly throughout. Like an Almodovar heroine, she appears permanently in drag but has none of the tortured soul beneath. If she is a comment on what an aging woman must become to survive in the modern world, we are given no sense of anything behind the bravado.
It is left to minor characters such as Ben Lloyd-Hughes’s toyboy, Cam, and Seline Hizli’s teenage mother, Lynsey, to provide the subtlety. Instead of their every breath being marshaled into a comic or caricatured punchline, they are allowed to retain some quiet humanity. The Freudian overtones of Hilary’s bike accident and the possibility that Cam’s sensitivity offers some sort of hope for the future are left to linger. That Lyndsey, despite her age and hilariously not-posh accent might still be a good mother, is one of the few issues that it looks like it might get a real airing – until the cowardly plot excuse of her dead boyfriend provides a side-step.
Added to this there is a lazy set: cupboards, rather than being full of well thought out household artifacts, contain just tinsel and other equally improbable things and the only props that carry any significance are clichéd: a childhood toy to cue in Tilly’s vulnerability (and explain the title) and a carton of Tropicana being casually swigged to cue in obliviousness – and its consequent disaster.
In spite of all the drama thrown at these characters, they fail to develop in any meaningful way. That these women- like adolescents themselves- are trapped in roles that can withstand no ambiguity is interesting symbolically, but dramatically a bore. There could have been a lot said in these two hours; the failure of feminism, the crisis of growing old, the difference between what you preach and what you practice – these are great theatrical themes. Sadly, they are not treated here with the intelligence or integrity they deserve.
