Reviews

Children’s Children

| London's West End |

25 May 2012

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.

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.