Jumpy

Synopsis

A mother, a wife, and fifty, Hilary once protested at Greenham. Now her protests tend to focus on persuading her teenage daughter to go out fully clothed. A frank and funny family drama questioning parental anxieties and life after fifty.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 20 October 2011

April De Angelis is a fine playwright who’s owed us a really good new play for some time. Despite a knockout performance by Tamsin Greig as her fifty year-old, crisis-ridden heroine, Hilary, I’m a bit jittery about declaring Jumpy that play.

Yet another “frank and funny family drama” feels like something belonging in the upstairs studio, with lots of raucous girl chat about sex and parenting seemingly culled from Loose Women on lunchtime television and a worn-out street demotic that has a teenage mum declaring, “If someone ate Dayne, I’d go mental.”

There’s no epic or metaphorical dimension that makes a “Royal Court” play feel special on the main stage; instead, we have a boulevard comedy (with a much weaker second act) very much conceived as a feminist riposte, perhaps, to Simon Gray’s self-flagellating menopausal emotional misfits Ben Butley and Simon Hench.<...

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Latest User Review

Simon - 16 March 2012:

..and are all the good reviews paid for by the Royal Court? It seems to me to be very strange that all the obviously "professional" reviews are glowing, and the obviously "amateur" (me and rds and Coral) are negative. Hmmm. I wonder why that is..?...

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