THREE GENERATIONS UNDER SMARTPHONE RULE
Bit late to this one, and it had mixed reviews – largely I suspect because Michael Wynne’s play, a two hour four-hander all-woman slice of life in Birkenhead doesn’t offer aa strong satisfying conclusion or denouement. But that can be quite refreshing: just life, reflected with little polemic intention other than a murmur at one point that the world is uncertain (always was) and that there is absurdity in living life through your phone with its pings and. Notifications and Facebookery and Xtwitter opinions. Not to mention all the swipe- right data opportunities for all generations and sexual possibilities.
But it’s truthful, and its funny in moments without straining to be so, and the women are real. Right from the opening moment as we find the three generations awaiting a chippy tea , three glued to phones exchanging joke memes and the sudden irrelevant awareness of a distant car crash in Germany. That they would be better employed in more actual conversation about their actual lives and feelings is apparent from the first , since Megyn, the teenage daughter of the exasperated Carmel (Michelle Butterly) has left school with no qualifications and speaks rarely, preferring to text. Jodie McNee’s Sarah, fetcher of the chips and pop, is a teacher, beguiled by her idealistic new head, and kindly suggesting the morose kid comes as a work experience. No dice. No reply. Widowed old Doreen (Sue Jenkins, understated comic brilliance clearly her forte) discusses her eBay online buy and sell business a bit and can’t finish her fish. Of all of them she is the most contented, and even dashes round to the kitchen to conduct a surprisingly flirtatious giggle with someone on the phone. Unnoticed by her phone staring relatives. Sarah extols her new chap, a dentist hence very clever (“well, not doctor-clever…” is one of the treasurable nuggets of real-lifery in the script).
No sooner are the chips eaten than abruptly Megyn dashes upstairs, holes up in Grandma’s bedroom and silently refuses to leave. Doreen, benign as ever, says she will take the settee, since the daughters’ own bedrooms are full of her online sales junk. When we rejoin the family two weeks or so later ,after a brief blackout with oddly eerie music, Megyn is still up there, food left out for her by the placid grandmother, with whom she communicates only by text.
At this point I bristled: there is a tediously overdone dramatic trope, from Mike Leigh to Florian Zeller’s only turkey The Son, and among their imitators. In this now- hackneyed setup, after writing some sprightly and reasonably credible family bickering dynamic the playwright sends the teenager to his/her room. And you sit there thinking “yup, it’s either a gunshot or a scream of ghastly discovery..”. And so it befalls, thus labelling the oeuvre a serious examination of teenage suicidality, which it generally isn’t.
But my suspicions were lulled by the selfaware line uttered by an irritable adult when dragging sounds are heard overhead, that she’s readying the chair ” for the noose”. Wynne signals he is not not falling for a cheap shock.
What he gives us instead is an unravelling of clues, subtle and credible. Carmel returns furious because Megyn’s social media is full of a fantasy of needy praise for her missing father, who clearly walked out ages ago, not giving a damn. Sarah is in shock from being conned and dumped by her boyfriend. (Tremendous line of outrage – “Is he even a Dentist?”). Old Doreen shocks her two adult daughters by preparing, tweezers and lippie and all, to go out on a date with a man off the internet called Barry. They think this disrespectful to their late Dad , whereon Mum offers the truth bomb that it wasn’t all that great, he being fussily, coercive controlling, not letting her work and refusing to allow fish and chips or coleslaw in the house. Oh, and the reason she loves her eBay pursuits pinging good news into her phone is at last having money and a purpose of her own. They’re stunned. Then Megyn appears downstairs and…no spoilers. To be fair, nothing that dramatic happens. But there are deeply touching moments here , and human absurdities. I don’t quite get the need for such eerie music but otherwise enjoyed my two hours there. And came out thinking a bit about the small secrets of uncelebrated female lives and conversations, and how unfortunate it is when too much of it is stolen by online vapidities.
Box office royalcourttheatre.com. . To. 19 august
Rating three.
theatreCat 