The first scene of Lee Mattinson’s play is a little disconcerting. Three generations of Newcastle women – mother, two daughters and grandmother – are gathered in a chalet in Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness to celebrate gran’s 70th birthday in 2010, and… all right, the restaurant booking has fallen through, and elder daughter Abigail (Laura Elphinstone, agonisingly good) dresses pointedly in jeans and jumper rather than the glad-rags of the other three, but what strikes one is the extent to which this family is not terribly dysfunctional. It doesn’t last, of course: younger daughter’s new fella is bound not to turn up, and it transpires that the missing aunt hasn’t even been invited. Subsequent scenes rewind, with more and more tension and unhappiness in evidence, through events in the same chalet in 1996 (for the formerly missing sister’s hen night) and 1961 (for “gran”’s wedding, whilst pregnant by someone other than the groom), before returning to 2010 for all those birds of ill omen to come home to roost.
    
Mattinson has a fine ear for Geordie bluntness: gran Barbara recalls, “Every day was Valentine’s for ya late granddad [sic], even before the Alzheimer’s”, whilst pert Jolene settles on an athletic date strategy because “these tits were made for trampolinin’.” I’m afraid, however, that as is often the case, the more truthful his characters grow, the less interesting. By the final scene, when mum Loretta has embarked on an essentially domestic-fascist rant, decrying her daughters and mother alike for the modesty of their ambitions towards happiness, we principally wonder how long she can keep it going. It is nevertheless a stark contrast from actor Monica Dolan’s performance in the preceding scene as Barbara’s poker-backed, Catholicism-soaked mother Edith.
    
The opening scene is paced oddly in Madani Younis’s first production since taking over the artistic helm at the Bush: players alternately tread on each other’s lines and leave pauses that seem more like awkward performance than a deliberately awkward mood. In scene three (1961), conversely, every instant of silence is uncomfortably well placed. But by this point we know that the proceedings can only end in one way, and that not the most compelling. The title refers to rows of (in Edith’s words) “little boxes full up with little lives”; Mattinson may enlarge those lives, but does not really deepen them.

Written for the Financial Times.