KIN
Royal Court Jerwood
Theatre Upstairs, London SW1
Opened 24 November, 2010
***
Sometimes it’s hard to avoid feeling ancient at the Royal Court. Polly
Stenham’s tales of neglected mid-teens began the trend, then earlier
this year came Anya Reiss’s Spur Of
The Moment, about barely-teen sexuality. Now E.V. Crowe’s Kin deals with ten-year-old girls
at boarding school. Put it this way: when a member of the
second-generation cast of Channel 4’s Skins
appears here as one of the oldies, anyone over 30 seems positively
antediluvian.
Mimi is a bright girl, but socially diffident; her roommate Janey is
domineering, one might even say bullying sometimes, but not the kind of
monster that blighted my and many others’ school days nor the kind that
housemistress Mrs B imagines as she compiles her report. We see
friendships, likes and dislikes, power plays both trivial and more
serious, uncertainties and insecurities. Both feel out of touch in time
and space with their parents: the play is set in the 1990s, close
enough to feel contemporary but conveniently devoid of email and mobile
phones. Really, they feel out of touch with everyone: family, staff,
each other, even themselves. Crowe does not go for overblown adolescent
existential angst, but simply shows in succeeding scenes thoughts and
feelings that are radically inconsistent but in no way dishonest.
Jeremy Herrin gets fine, unwinsome performances out of his young cast;
at the performance I saw, Ciara Southwood was accomplished as Mimi and
(confusingly) Mimi Keene appropriately assured as Janey. It has to be
said, though, that even in the studio space upstairs, diction could be
a problem; two or three times Southwood caught herself gabbling and
alertly went back to correct herself. But perhaps the play suffers
similarly from diction problems in a thematic sense. In this case,
having Mimi confronted by an informing classmate and Annette Badland’s
over-zealously interrogating Mrs B shortly after the girl has played
John Proctor in the school production of The Crucible amounts to
over-crisply enunciating matters. I’m also not entirely sure that the
play’s position is as I have described it; it may be intended to bear
out, to some degree at least, Mrs B’s assertion that the girls “are
small dogs in packs or pairs, doing what small dogs do”. Certainly both
behaviour and language directly challenge our collective fetishisation
of youthful innocence, but to no clear conclusion.