Naima Khan reviews Simon Stephen's highly irritating, deeply thought-provoking play about hope.
Someone described Morning to me as “concentrated Simon Stephens”. If you're familiar with his works you know this means Morning is deeply philosophical and unafraid. If you're not, suffice to say it's both a noteworthy piece and an incredibly irritating one.
The story follows Stephanie at a time of pivotal change. She's 17 or 18, her best friend – who doesn't give a damn about her – is off to uni with a sack of daddy's money, her mum is dying, her brother is isolated and she has fallen back on a disturbingly strange coping mechanism that causes her to smile all the time and laugh at horribly inappropriate moments. But this isn't all down to an automated psychosomatic response. At one point she tells us that although her boyfriend has been reported missing, she asked his mother if he's free to hang out and a giggling fit followed. She doesn't exactly work to makes us like her but assumes we do anyway.
Like Stephanie, all the characters are most interesting when they're philosophising about hope (or rather a lack thereof) and misconceptions. Their views are rooted in a quote from Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.”
This coupled with the scenario Stephen's provides gives us the fuel for hours and hours of meandering conversations that go on long after the curtain falls. He makes me think of the fragility of family, our prescriptive and responsive ways of creating a safe, progressing society and how those responses to our dilemmas so often fail. But still (for me anyway) there is no getting away from how irritating teenagers sound with their perpetually rising intonation and their glaring immaturity. (This is however “a play for young people” so I'm not exactly the intended audience.)
It's appropriate then, that Sean Holmes celebrates this adolescent nature in his production. As Stephen's characters fall madly in love, attempt a threesome, commit horrendous crimes and show an honesty so raw it makes me recoil, he has them fidget and pace, ignore and withdraw from the few imposing items that take over the stage. They burn paper boats and hide behind paper hats, they scrawl all over their homes and roller-skate across the stage. It is messy, it is brutal and by the end I'm convinced it was worth sitting through although the experience is far from pleasant.
Some of Stephen's writing here points out our continuing similarities with his characters. Our need to overly romanticise and sometimes ignore and disengage with what we perceive to be unchangeable or hopeless. As such, Morning is a solid piece that does everything it intends to do but after the final bows I'm hella glad to get out of the world Stephen's creates. 
Morning runs at Lyric Hammermsith until 22nd September
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