April de Angelis’ Jumpy
is a strange play. At once about Hilary approaching fifty and the impending
sense of a mid-life crisis that follows her around, it also follows Hilary’s
relationship with her often-wayward fifteen-year-old daughter Tilly, and the accompanying
dramas, struggles, and battles which seem to follow her around. Claimed to be “the funniest new play the West
End has seen in ages” when it premiered
in London in 2012, it comes across here as blunt, unsubtle, and coarse, and it makes for a rather long and tedious two-and-a-half
hours of theatre.
But I’m
not entirely sure that it should be this way. De Angelis’ writing seems to
carry a weight behind it, a weight of observation and experience, and as she
has stated
in interviews, the play did evolve out of having a teenage daughter and
being faced with similar struggles as her main character. While there are some
humorous moments in the play, a lot of the play’s appeal has to do with age and
experience – it is written for and with a very specific audience in mind, one
that has shared the experiences of her characters, maybe not to the letter but
in spirit, and the play’s reception in the Drama Theatre seems to confirm this.
The youngest audience member by a considerable number of years (merely half of
Hilary’s age), I found myself the only one not laughing at times, the only one not
moved to applause or appreciative mumblings of approval, and I think this has
to do with age and experience more than anything else.
Director
Pamela Rabe keeps the text moving, makes the scene changes mobile and fluid, a baggage-carousel
of automated moving beds, kitchen units, sofas, stairs, and panels which shift
in and out as required. While at times a little heavy-handed, the focus is on
the whole clear, although some moments tend towards being overplayed or played
larger than life. Presented here by Sydney
Theatre Company in a Melbourne Theatre
Company production, the show feels slick but perhaps too much so – there never
really feels that there is an emotional connection between any of the
characters and/or the audience, they are in effect mouthpieces for de Angelis’
ideas and points of view, and in this regard the cast are all more than capable
performers; I never felt that there was anything much to care about in these
characters, except when Tilly’s parents and those of her boyfriend argue over who
has to make a decision to keep the child Tilly is apparently pregnant with – it’s
an argument we hear all too often in newspapers and media cycles today, but it
doesn’t make it any less affecting in this context; if anything, it is the one
truly moving and impassioned scene in the play.
As Hilary, Jane
Turner (of Kath & Kim fame) spends much of the play trying to negotiate the
automated furniture. While this might have been intended to appear as bewilderment,
after a season in Melbourne it just looks unprofessional and amateur; there are
other occasions when she seems to be playing a rather one- or two-dimensional
character, a mere mouthpiece, with no emotional investment or belief in what
the character stands for. In a play about ideas and fighting for something,
this is not an altogether good look. As Tilly, Brenna Harding is a firebrand,
but she too tends to overplay her dramatic argument scenes to the point of
caricature – lots of eye rolling, slouching, hair-tossing &c. Caroline
Brazier’s Bea is impassioned but volatile, indignant at the thought that her
son should take responsibility for Tilly’s suspected pregnancy; John Lloyd
Fillingham’s Roland is at first endearing in his squeaky appeasement, but as
his character and voice continues in much the same vein for the whole
performance, there isn’t terribly much to endear him by the end of the play.
Laurence Boxhall’s Josh has few lines, and even then he only manages to grunt (in
character), what Tilly sees in him we may never know; Tariro Mavondo’s Lyndsey
is kindhearted but naïve, and there is a touching moment with her and her young
child late in the second act. David Tredinnick’s Mark is Hilary’s
long-suffering husband, and he makes sure we know it; though he is decent, he
is not strong enough to hold his own against Tilly or Hilary. Marina Prior’s Frances Cam ,
but his appearance is all too brief to make much of an impact.
Michael Hankin’s
moving set is a delight, and even though the ceiling seems too low, it creates
a kind of focusing lens for the action and does not detract too much. Matt
Scott’s lighting is rich and warm, cleverly marking spaces and moods, and his
outdoors lighting on the beach reminds me of the rich colour deployed in Michael
Gow’s Away. Teresa Negroponte’s
costumes are functional and are incredibly effective in subtly marking shifts
in the characters’ attitudes, habits, and thinking. Drew Crawford’s music
sounds like a saxophone-driven riff on Michael Nyman (not a bad thing by any
means), and lends the production a burst of energy in scene changes.
While I can
understand not being part of the target audience, one thing that still grates
about this production is the use of British accents. True, the play is British,
but surely ‘teenagerness’ and ‘turning fifty’ are not exclusively British
phenomena; even though a play is set in Britain and makes specific references
to places in and around the Greater London area, this specificity is what makes
the play universal – the fact that these things happened to British women means
we can find our own points of identification with these events and draw our own
parallels. The accents in Jumpy do
not feel organic to the story but rather feel affected, put on, and do not come
across as natural or realistic.
There should be a
lot in this play to like, but at the end of the day I can only feel as though
there have been several opportunities that have been passed over here. Far from
making me jumpy, this play left me unaffected and restless, indifferent almost,
and I’m not comfortable with that, not for a play where there is so much at
stake for the characters, and so much living breathing immediate relevance to
our current socio-political situation in Australia
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