Review Round-up: School report for Dunster’s Children

Jeremy Herrin directs a cast comprising Darrell D’Silva (Michael),
Trevor Fox (Gordon), Emily Berrington (Effie), John MacMillan
(Castro), Sally Rogers (Sally) and Beth Cordingly (Louisa).

{Children’s
Children::L01819075432} is playing through to 30 June 2012.

Michael
Coveney
Whatsonstage.com
★★★

“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… 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’… ‘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.”

Michael
Billington
Guardian
★★★

“I
find myself wondering what Matthew Dunster’s new play is really about.
Is it a satire on the perils of TV fame, a study of the fragility of
friendship, or a didactic warning about the danger of bequeathing “a
fucked-up planet” (in one character’s words) to future generations? It
could be any of those and much else besides – but, while moderately
engaging, it suffers from its scattergun approach… I suspect the play is
really an indictment of both generations: the self-seeking individualism
of Thatcher’s children and their ineffectual offspring, who talk a good
ethical game while lacking the capacity for action. While I applaud the
intention, Dunster handles it clumsily… Still, even if the play lurches
from one theme to another, Jeremy Herrin’s production keeps us watching
and the actors are all good. Darrell d’Silva is very amusing as the
bumptious TV star, Trevor Fox as his parasitic old friend has the faint
air of a Tyneside Iago, and Sally Rogers as the latter’s wife offers a
sharp portrayal of the smiler with knife under cloak.”

Dominic Maxwell
The Times
★★★★

“Now
really, as a pitiless critic, I should have a few stern words for
Matthew Dunster. Because, for all the wit and empathy in his new play,
for all the sharpness of Jeremy Herrin’s production, he tackles too much
here… the strands don’t quite unite into one big hug of narrative. But
sod it, if a certain messiness in construction is what enables Dunster
to give us so much of the messiness of human life, then so be it.
Children’s Children has electrifying moments, such as
when Gordon debases himself in front of his oldest friend, or when
Michael unleashes years of frustration to Effie. It has clunky moments,
such as when Castro comes on to Louisa…But this lengthy play also has
wit, intelligence and a rare sense of scope. It’s excitingly alive. Just
when you think you know where it’s going, it goes somewhere else: kills
someone off, jumps two years ahead, lets a quiet character shout, dares
to be a bit of a yarn. It’s hard to imagine it getting a better
production. You believe in these tangled
relationships even at the show’s more satirical extremes. (You believe
in the settings, too — two tasteful interiors and a neat poolside area —
in Robert Innes Hopkins’ set)… Dunster knows how to satirise his
characters’ selfishness but allow them rogue impulses and a very human
capacity for self-deception that’s matched by their need for
self-respect. Yes, it should be, could be, tighter. But I’d happily have
hung around for acts four, five and six of this fascinating show.”

Kate Bassett
Independent

“The fast
movers in Children’s Children are of the sexually
unsettling variety. In Matthew Dunster’s dark new domestic drama,
Michael (Darrell D’Silva) and Gordon (Trevor Fox) are best mates, both
of earthy northern stock, who’ve known each other since drama
school…This is, in some respects, an old-fashioned play along Shavian
lines. There’s a nod to Major Barbara, as Gordon’s
daughter Effie (Emily Berrington) starts out as a censorious teen,
upbraiding her parents’ compromising work in commercials. She worships
her boyfriend Castro (John MacMillan), a documentary-maker on a mission
to expose polluting oil companies. Effie then sets up a fashion label
that uses a developing world sweatshop. As for Castro, he tries to
seduce Louisa while dissing multinationals. The long speeches about
moral choices aren’t convincingly integrated and the multiplying nasty
twists towards the end feel forced. Nonetheless, Fox’s quiet
schadenfreude is chilling, the eruptions of fury are
savage, and D’Silva is outstanding, seeming to crumple and age before
your eyes.”

Charles Spencer
Telegraph
★★

“Matthew
Dunster’s Children’s Children seems merely
unpleasant. There isn’t a single character you warm to in this story of a
successful TV presenter and his failed actor friend to whom he
implausibly lends a cool £250,000. There is also a disconcerting
misanthropy in Dunster’s writing, coupled with long, tedious lectures
about the damage humans are inflicting on the environment. It is strange
how people who want to save the world so often seem to despise the
people that inhabit it. There are lively performances, especially from
Darrell D’Silva as the TV star overtaken by disgrace, Trevor Fox as his
sponging friend and newcomer Emily Berrington as a self-obsessed fashion
model. Her scenes of gratuitous nudity seem like a desperate attempt to
give this dull, cynical and often downright incompetent play at least a
flicker of prurient interest.”

– Julianna Fazio