A very well-acted ninety minutes by Jonathan Livingstone and Phoebe Pryce who were constantly and exclusively on-stage. Most of the time they were playing the pushy and cashing-in working class parents of a girl who was a tennis protege and making a life on tour. The action moved rapidly and repeatedly between time-settings, moving from the child's conception to the parent's planning to visit her as a grown up who had given up tennis and was living in America, alienated from her parents to the point of being in litigation with them. This made for an engaging telling of the unfolding of events that forced the audience to concentrate and take an active role in piecing the story together. In a nutshell, we had the parents identifying their daughter as a potential star, making sacrifices aoof time and money for her to realise her potential, pushing and hothousing her and perhaps bringing about the eventual disaffection with the sport and metamorphosis into a 'celebrity'.
Aside from being the parents, the actors from time to time played out the daughter's lines and overall gave us a good feeling for the child's compliance with the parents' ambitions that culminated in eventual rebellion. So it was certainly an engaging evening, albeit one that for me pushed the boundaries of plausibility with the parents' plans to sue the daughter if not the daughter's alienation from her parents. Were there takeaways? I suppose if you have children, it would be an interesting evening to prompt thought on the extent to which children should be pushed to realise their talents and how parental sacrifice should not carry the expectation or price of payback. I don't think it was a great play but Oli Forsyth's work was certainly worth the hour and half of its duration.
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