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.