Even with Tamsin Greig on form, Jumpy proves to be an ordinary play that holds the unused seeds of something great.
Tamsin Greig and Doon Mackichan are both a good few years off fifty. But in April de Angeli's Jumpy, they play women crumbling at the thought of having more days behind them than they do ahead. Stumbling through dealing with her grossly stereotyped teenager, Greig's character Hillary and her disengaged husband Mark (Ewan Stewart) make this a play for parents, that has the opportunity to say much more than it actually does.
Hillary worries about being made redundant at work as well as at home. She focuses on her waning relationship with her daughter Tilly whose first sexual experiences she wants to be safe but is hampered by how overwhelmingly cringe-worthy she finds the thought of her daughter having sex. In portraying this fairly predictable mother-daughter dynamic, de Angeli hints at the present reflecting the past and Hillary's struggle not to make the same mistakes as her own long-suffering mother.
De Angeli also uses the polar opposites that are Hillary and Francis (Makichan) to make some excellent points about the female psyche within family life before the pill; and the way mothers can often become ineffectual disciplinarians when fathers take a back seat. But Jumpy still embodies a lot of the same issues that the Royal Court is so often criticised for. It looks at an unremarkable middle-class family – albeit at an uncertain time in their lives – but addresses their issues so introspectively that it misses every opportunity to make itself extraordinary.
For example, Hillary's definition of herself is wrapped up in a few days spent protesting at Greenham Common when she was a student. The community that was felt there – the protesters' belief in something bigger than themselves – is barely touched on. We never hear about the mothers that those protesters became and as a result Hillary exists in her own small world interrupted only by the people brought into her life by Tilly.
This has its upside though. The parents of Tilly's boyfriend tensely manoeuvre through their responsibilities with even more disagreements than Hillary and Mark and the comedy rumbles consistently. It strikes a strong chord with parents in the audience, but it leaves the rest of us thinking, as Francis does, “why does anyone ever have children?”
Jumpy runs at Royal Court Theatre until 19th November.
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