Jumpy is just that. April De Angelis relies on momentous events – pregnancies, marital crises, affairs, gunshots – to make her points, only to subsequently bottle them with some coincidental get out clause or other. It’s a shame, because, not only could tighter plot-points have carried equal weight, this tendency is the only major fault of an hilarious theatrical firecracker.
At its best, Jumpy matches One Man Two Guv’nors for laughs, but without sacrificing real-world purpose and political drive. It can be elegantly poignant and Nina Raine’s direction is among the best you’ll see this year: never showy and concept-heavy, but full of intelligent and restrained choices that eventually hit home. On top of that, Raine has drawn performances of extraordinary emotional suppleness from a first-rate cast.
Unlike De Angelis’ early work, Jumpy is not an outright feminist play. Sure, it sees the world through a prism of feminism, but it is far from restricted to the subject. As well the ageing process and family, De Angelis targets the replacement of ideology with irony and a society so materialistic that it views children as lifestyle accessories.
Tamsin Greig plays Hilary, a mother-of-one recently turned fifty and undergoing a delicately underplayed mid-life crisis. De Angelis tells us all we need to know in the first pinpoint image: Hilary enters, shoulders slumped with the weight of her shopping. She wears sensible clothes, black and olive green, and no make-up. Her fifteen-year old daughter Tilly (Bel Powley), dressed and dolled up like a rainbow, bounces down the stairs to the beat of her iPod, blasting out Florence and the Machine’s Dog Days Are Over and goes out for the night. Immediately, a bottle of wine comes out of the shopping bags and Greig sorts herself out with a large glass and a sigh.
Ostensibly, then, Jumpy charts Hilary’s mid-life crisis through separation, burlesque and dalliances with men both her own age and half it (including a neat nod to Saved when a twenty year-old cleans a cut on her knee). Raine has various items – a cuddly toy, iPod dock, make up bag, duster and blanket – accumulate on the stairs, marking the several ages of woman.
However, there’s plenty more going on beneath the surface and Jumpy really stirs as it gradually refines. De Angelis diagnoses our society with a fatal insincerity deep-rooted in materialism.
Frances once protested at Greenham Common with Hilary, now she’s busy “ironically deconstructing” burlesque. Tilly’s friends share a gun “for a joke…like men having long hair in your day – or women taking the pill.” The clinical white walls of Lizzie Clachan’s set, with their cupboards of hidden clutter, suggest an anxiety about self-revelation. “Why won’t anyone take me seriously,” is Hilary’s final lament. It’s as much about her age as the world that refuses to do so.
But Jumpy’s flipside concerns a crisis of youth. De Angelis draws comparison between Hilary’s first period, marked with a miniature rite of passage to demarcate childhood’s end, with Tilly’s claim about fresher’s week, during which a childhood totem is set alight for the same purpose. Children, she suggests, remain children too long; nineteen is the new thirteen. They’re mollycoddled and responsibility-free. They’re helped with homework and plied with toys throughout their teens. “We gave them everything,” the adults intone, not realising that they have treated their children like status symbols or pimped up accessories, like Tamagotchis to be displayed around the playground.
At one point, De Angelis manages to implicate us exquisitely. Tilly returns after running away. Her hair is knotted and her make-up smeared. Her tights are laddered and she only has one shoe. And, while we assume the worst, she cheerily takes herself off to bed. “I lost a shoe. Off the pier at Brighton.” De Angelis nails what Aleks Sierz has called “the culture of fear,” by planting it in us alongside her characters. Why can we not trust a sixteen year-old girl to take care of herself?
Powley is terrific as Tilly, contrasting a vulnerable child with a spitting gremlin. Doon Mackichan is in her element as Frances, given free reign with a free-spirit, which reaps huge dividends and hearty laughter in an extended, excruciating burlesque routine that almost tears through the pages of De Angelis’ text. There’s brilliant work from a characteristically oil-slick Richard Lintern and Susan Woodward as a cold and corrosive mother.
But Greig is best of all: absolutely, but invisibly, controlled, her emotions flow in streamlets. She keeps Hilary real, finding brittleness without tipping her into fragility or nervous breakdown. Greig handles comedy like a tap-in merchant: laughs are mostly scored through reactions and her touch is light but accurate, but, as she proves with a burlesque of her own, she can goof with the best of them.
Photograph: Robert Workman
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