Synopsis Michael and Gordon have been best friends since acting college. Now, 20 years later, Michael is Mr Saturday Night TV but failing actor Gordon is struggling with enormous debts. Meanwhile Gordon s daughter Effie couldn't care less about her Dad's problems - she is far more interested in the film that her cool boyfriend is making and setting up an ecologically sound clothing label. When Gordon asks Michael to lend him a large sum of money it sets in motion a series of events that reveal irreparable cracks in the characters relationships.
Dates: Opens 24 May 2012. Mon-Sat 19:30. Sat Mat 14:30. May 24 at 19:00. Extra Mats May 30, Jun 20 at 14:30. No perf. Jun 4 26 June 2012 19:30 - Captioned
Matthew Dunster’s spiky, squawky new play, Children’s Children, tracks a friendship of two Geordie drama students, Michael and Gordon, down the years as one becomes an obnoxious celebrity (“Mr Saturday Night” on television) and the other an embittered loser with a wife whose career suddenly takes off in a television soap.
Michael’s second wife, Louisa, is a sort of posh outsider, as she’s both public school-educated and a southerner; Michael is best friends, too, with Gordon’s wife, Sally, and even more 'taken' with their nubile young daughter, Effie, whose serious-minded boyfriend, Castro, a budding film maker, develops an intense passion for Louisa.
So far so neat, formal and complicated, but Jeremy Herrin’s production allows Dunster’s baggy play to breathe and dance along its long, direct address speeches (each character has one) and the meat of its meaning, which is contained in scabrous outbursts, notably from Darrell D'Silva’s grotesque and oily TV “personality”.
Michael loathes being asked to buy The Big Issue because he does so much for charity already. Trevor Fox’s battered, disappointed Gordon, who earns “pocket money” from gardening, has a right go at bloggers who aren’t really journalists and wheedles a huge loan from Michael for a business he has no intention of starting.
Over four years – and courtesy of Robert Innes Hopkins’s brilliant design, mixing scenic interiors with the Almeida’s brick surround – we move from Michael’s swanky abodes in Holland Park and Dorset (complete with onstage swimming pool) to Sally’s Denmark Hill home, as two plot strands develop.
First, Michael finds himself in the thick of sexual harassment allegations, driving a wedge of hostility through his private life. And second, Effie, superbly and seductively played by Emily Berrington (still a drama student at the Guildhall School), channels her modelling career into motherhood and the clothing industry while Castro (forcibly played by John MacMillan) harangues Beth Cordingley’s lovely but confused Louisa with the injustices of the oil industry.
[WOS_QU@TE]#You feel Dunster is trying to say everything he thinks about everything#[/WOS_QU@TE]That last speech goes on, and on, for over 10 minutes, following a shock arrival on the doorstep which threatens the already tottering state of play between the others. Sally Rogers as Sally, who’s grown into herself over the play, initiates an extraordinary scene of feral behaviour involving truth-telling, pent up animosities and a kitchen knife, but no blood is spilled. Things have gone beyond even that.
“We have a lifestyle that we like and we don’t want to pay more for it”, says Castro, mid-harangue, fingering the decadence of Western society, to which there is simply no reply. You feel Dunster is trying to say everything he thinks about everything, and you’ve got to salute that sort of crazy theatrical ambition. The end result is highly entertaining and far from perfect: just like the world he’s describing.
If this was one play, I'd give it 4 stars, but it feels like Matthew Dunster has actually written four plays here. At least 2 of them are very very good. Most infuriatingly, Trevor Fox's brilliant wannabe Iago character from the first "Shakespearean" play is not given his due. I know he was brilliant because I loathed him much more than I loathed the dashing Ewan McGregor at the Donmar or the wisecracking GQ at the Globe, who both compensated for their dastardly deeds (as Iago) by wild doses of charisma. Trevor Fox is so hateful and angry and loathing and self-loathing that you yearn for his comeuppance, but the play lets you down, not because he doesn't get it, but because the play glosses over it. And the reason the play glosses over it is because it's too busy turning into another play that's about oil pollution and the way we manufacture clothes in sweatshops. This second play is downright awful, preachy and whiny and annoying. A third Nabokov adaptation features a Humbert Humbert who fancies a gorgeous young girl and gets flashed by her naked body when she grows old enough to taunt him. He also faces the consequences of his actions in a most abrupt and unsatisfying manner. A fourth Chekhovian play, about a quiet woman who emerges from her pent-up shell, her daughter who has no thought for anyone, and her lusty son-in-law who has his sights set on an older woman, is a good play, but can't quite quell the mourning for the sudden disappearance of the other plays, though not the one about the environment. Of course, Dunster wants to make the same points Love Love Love is making so brilliantly at the Royal Court, about how we abandon our responsibilities to others and future generations out of self-indulgence. But he fails to connect his threads in the beautiful way the threads are connected in Mike Bartlett's more focused play. Ultimately, you are left with some fantastic performances, with Trevor Fox's schadenfreude monster and Emily Berrington's self-obsessed Lolita making indelible impressions. Also brilliant were Sally Rogers' shrew who grew and John MacMillan's wannabe world saver. The only likeable character in the whole play is wonderfully played by Beth Cordingly, a peripheral character who soaks up the hatefulness and frustrations of the other characters with some degree of grace. Then again, the other characters are so irredeemably horrible that I actually wanted her to put on her copper costume from the Bill and arrest the poxy lot of them. - steveatplays
26 May 12
Adressing the audience seemed a bit forced at the beginning but worked increasingly better as the story progressed. I particularly enjoyed Castro as the wanna be revolutionary who is doomed to fail to make an impact from the start. Outstanding is Sally Roger as the underestimated wife who is bearing the brunt of her husbands failure who is the only one who moved on from her dreams. Worth watching! - elisabeth
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