This interesting play got an average rating from the FT and every other review I read. I can entirely see why, though if you had to force me off the fence I'd go lower. It is well acted with a great set and as engaging a story as one might expect prying into a family's business. But, on the other hand, for me, the characters seemed exaggerated and I was very unsure what significant messages I was supposed to depart with to consider. In truth, I think it will be an evening that was enjoyable but quickly forgotten.
The play is entirely set in the kitchen of a couple - Sal and David - who are the caricature of the leftish, reasonably successful FE college lecturer cadre born, like me, in 1951. Sal went to Greenham Common, keeps an untidy house and has three children. In the first act, we are in 1997 and the daughter is at Cambridge where she says everyone is depressed because they realise that that they are not as exceptional as they had been led to believe at school. She has two brothers, they younger Tom and Carl who is that evening going to introduce his girlfriend to the family. Sal believes in a lot of open talk about sex to the degree that most children - I would have thought - would find embarrassing. But not these. Finding Sal sitting on David's knees, fully dressed and ordinary, she is told to carry on giving him a blow job. Anyway, the girlfriend Harriet is introduced and immediately somewhat condemned as posh and an airhead. Then, the bombshell is dropped that she is also pregnant and the couple are looking for some help to pay for ab abortion. David - who inexplicably reads the Telegraph - makes a lot of heavy weather of this request and the evening is engulfed in argument.
Act two is ten years later and Carl and Harriet are married with children, Tom has come out as gay and Polly is working as a corporate lwayer and having an affair with her boss - sexting like mad as she chats with Tom. Harriet and Carl turn up and another argument ensues. The evening culminates in Tom attempting suicide in the locked bathroom - as you do.
Finally we are in 2017 on the verge of Sal's cremation. Carl and Harriet are now separated, Tom is living at home and Polly's career is going from strength to strength. The act is dominated by David reading out the eulogy to Sal that he is planning to give in a few minutes time. This reveals to the children a few things they didn't know about their mother - such as the fact that she was jailed for her Greenham Common activities. I must admit, this crescendo left me unmoved and the revelations seemed implausible - as if the loquacious Sal would not have let slip that she did some bird for her leftish activities.
So there we are. The writer Jack Thorne definitely captured the caricature of his target and the cast delivered the acting. But, so what?
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