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.