A stab in the dark

The Grown-Ups may be flawed,
but its flashes of brilliance and tight performances hint at a welcome new direction for the Abbey.
By Colin Murphy

This play is a mess, but an audacious one. Though tightly staged and very well acted, The Grown-Ups is all over the place. Yet, amidst dialogue that verges at times on the comically bland, there are occasional flights of real poetry; amidst scenarios that border on cliché there are moments of sharp satire, of biting insight, and of lyrical adventure.

As with Paul Mercier's Homeland, just finished at the Abbey, the weaknesses of The Grown-Ups are evidence of the potential strengths of new Abbey director Fiach Mac Conghail's programming. It seems we are to have a national theatre concerned (even obsessively so) with holding a mirror up to our times, and willing to take risks on new material in order to do so. Even when the work isn't good, or is badly flawed, it is invigorating to see new contemporary material, and it is energising for the theatrical community.

As it is now, The Grown-Ups will not survive this first outing. It is overwritten, too strained, too thematically predictable, to be revived a few years from now. It is mired in the self-consciousness that comes with trying too hard to capture the zeitgeist.

But there is too much that is good in it for it to be thrown out. Playwright Nicholas Kelly has written parts of a very good play – lines and speeches that jump out for their sharpness, their poetry, their comedy – but he hasn't written a good play around them. There are flashes of extravagant and exciting lyricism, and ripples of harsh emotional truth, which may prove the seed of a more coherent later play.

The publicity blurb gives a good idea of what the play's about, and what's wrong with it. "Alan and Nicola are desperate to keep up with the boom time. They breakfast in Crumb, have raw juice in Melon and drink in Arcadia. They work hard, talk less, and have pretty bad sex." Ultimately, "Alan finds himself questioning his values and wondering if he can cut it in this new world of material success".

In amidst that fairly generic concept there is a distressingly contorted plot, which involves a number of people we never meet called Richard, Jeff, James, George, etc, all of whom sound utterly venal and become pretty much indistinguishable.

On stage, Alan and Nicola worry about property and their static careers, while Amy and Stephen are addicted to anti-depressants and alcohol, respectively. There's an odd scenario involving a nasty 16 year old student of Amy's, called Scott, who alleges she beat him up, and is something of a totem for the self-regarding and ultimately destructive materialism that apparently inflicts our society.

Kelly works hard to explain the plot, with the result that the play is littered with tedious exposition (most of it thrust on the Alan character), and it appears to be an attack on the narcissism and spiritual bankruptcy he sees around him. But there's simply far too much off-stage action for it to make much dramatic sense. Instead, we're left with a pretty simple satire-cum-farce, with good observational comedy on home furnishings, Prozac and personal space, which is occasionally laced with a dark edge that is uncomfortable not because of what it exposes, but because it doesn't really gel with the flighty nature of the humour.

The Grown-Ups is stuck somewhere between Friends, or Seinfeld, and Albee's The Zoo Story. It doesn't know whether it is an affectionate satire on modern urban living and social mores, or a dark indictment of them.

The cast is very strong, and director Gerry Stembridge generally gets a lot out of them – he has a particularly fine touch with the more satirical or over-the-top scenes. But there is a core flaw in this production, which emanates from the script and is possibly compounded by the direction. This is in the central character, Alan. Jonathan Forbes has the unenviable and ultimately doomed task of reconciling a number of tensions that cut through this character, and thus the play: Alan is the straight man around whom all the madcap action revolves, and whose moral quest is supposedly the play's driving force. But his character is so passive, so unobtrusive, as to be overwhelmed by the exaggerated, occasionally cartoon-like characters around him. Alan seems a quiet and unassuming chap, but is constantly given the job of explaining the complex and constantly changing plot (to the others and thereby to the audience). Forbes, though, is very good, his control and range of expression almost equal to the impossible task of reconciling the endlessly bland dialogue he is given with his role as a supposed moral agitator. Around him, each of the others has more fun and more leeway playing characters that are meatier and entertainingly exaggerated. The Clinic's Leigh Arnold, in her Irish stage debut as Amy, is wonderful, very funny and occasionally bitingly incisive.

And then there's Stephen Brennan's character, Stephen, the chief indication of a lurking dramatic intelligence at work behind this play. A drunk and eccentric older man, partner to Amy, he wanders in and out of the play like a seer or prophet in a classical tragedy, pronouncing upon events and people in a lyrical, cryptic, fashion. The character both provides relief from the self-regarding obsessiveness of the younger characters, and acts as a foil for the occasional heavy-handedness of Kelly's social commentary. Brennan is super in the role, relishing its air of eccentricity and hazy mysticism. "The malaise, the malaise," he shouts, "this splenetic new city!" It may not be enough to lift The Grown-Ups out of its dramatic doldrums, but it could be the call to arms for Fiach Mac Conghail's new Abbey. The malaise might be lifting.