My Child

Synopsis

Faced with losing his child in a custody battle, a desperate father discovers that being a good man seems to count for very little. Mike Bartlett's first play takes an incisive, honest look at fatherhood and what it means to be a good parent.

Our Review:

10 May 2007

The life of a man, said the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, is nasty, brutish and short, and the same could be said of this stunning almost first play by 25-year-old Mike Bartlett – I have seen an even more complex, remarkable Bartlett play about racism and peer group pressure in the Hampstead Theatre’s Heat and Light young people’s programme - but he must count on the record as yet another highly promising graduate of the Royal Court’s Young Writers Programme.

The Downstairs auditorium has been obliterated by designer Miriam Buether. The audience enters a tunnel that might well be a carriage on the Jubilee Line, with yellow tubular poles and handrails, where a young boy chases an electrified model car and actors you recognise – Ben Miles, Sara Kestelman, Jan Chappell, Lia Williams in a bright orange hair-do – pretend to blend in. We’re standing in a space that does not want to be in the Royal Court but take us elsewhere.

The more indolent first night cr...

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Latest User Review

ryan - 22 May 2007:

A heavy handed smattering of cliches. Don't bother....

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