Naima Khan reviews Marianne Elliott's production of Simon Stephen's Port at National Theatre
Moment to moment, Port at National Theatre is surprisingly gripping. It's surprising because its aims are fairly modest and its plot, though covering more than a decade, doesn't shout about its drama. But there is a lot of drama here. When we first meet Racheal and Billy they are children in their mum's car waiting for their hotheaded father to calm down and let them into their flat. Their mother leaves, their violent dad remains emotionally unavailable, Billy ends up in juvy then jail while grandparents die or are abandoned and Racheal suffers a disastrous marriage.
Despite all this, I really didn't find it that depressing. Racheal's spirit is so resilient, so frank and quietly optimistic that she leaves her audience with hope. Actor Kate O'Flynn remains on stage throughout her ageing, aided by Lizzie Clachan's sets that rise up and sink down around her. Her portrayal captures that hope with ease and she has a remarkable ability to fill the stage with a stuffy, almost suffocating realisation of her family's limitations.
I think that's key: that she recognises, however painfully, even as a child, the direction her family is taking. But when it comes to herself, hope and determination remains throughout. That said, Racheal's no saint. The way she treats her grandmother is hard to watch and her hesitation with the boy who might actually be good for her is frustratingly real. It doesn't help that between the darker moments O'Flynn gives her a Catharine-Tate-Show-like quality to mask Racheal's insecurities and it doesn't really convince.
The plays' successes lie around its characters, whom writer Simon Stephens has built up to reflect the mood of a time and place and maybe an era. In Stockport in the '90s, Manchester is a heaving transit point where Racheal is enveloped in a world that people go through, not to. But her need to leave town is less about contemporary ideas on travel and middle-class aspirations and more about a desperate need to change her own narrative. But this character's desperate attempts to ensure that her mother's past is not her future could be what leaves me disappointed in Port.
Although the inter-generational double casting is a great idea, it isn't built up enough. The play becomes overly reliant on characterisation and wraps things up so nicely that it leaves us little to chew on. Technically we don't know what happens to Racheal and her brother after the final scene but there's no fear of the future there either. That said, the writing is so strong that, on their own, I could write an essay on each scene and yet as a whole, things are spelled out too plainly and the past is too neatly collated to warrant much lingering discussion. 
Port runs at National Theatre until 24th March
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