Theatre review: Jumpy

Fifteen is not an easy age: that moment when kids are babies one minute, adults the next, and often explosively unable to square the circle between the two. And 50 is not an easy age either; the turning-point between nymph and crone, when heterosexual women realise that from now on, sex may be hard to get, and love even harder.

Gail Watson as Frances and Pauline Knowles as Hilary in Jumpy at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. Pic: contributed

Jumpy ****

Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

So when 50-year-old Hilary comes home from work one day to find that her 15-year old daughter Tilly has been having sex upstairs with her monosyllabic boyfriend Josh, their relationship enters one of those full-tilt crises – complete with yells of “I hate you” on both sides, all-night stop-outs, and breathtaking rudeness from daughter to mother at every turn – that are common in real life, but rarely feature in serious drama.

April De Angelis, though, is no ordinary dramatist, but a full-blooded feminist who loves to put female experience centre stage; and in Jumpy – first seen in London in 2011, and now revived at the Lyceum in a no-holds-barred production by Cora Bissett – she offers an uncensored account of just how bleak and bloody so-called family life can get, as both generations negotiate this most difficult of corners.

On a stage filled by designer Jean Chan with an avalanche of collapsing domestic clutter, we watch two marriages totter, Hilary flirt dangerously with Josh’s Dad Roland, her husband Mark sigh patiently in the background, and Tilly’s friend Lyndsey give birth to a bouncing baby boy, while Hilary’s friend Frances – hilariously overplayed by Gail Watson – takes sexual desperation to extremes by becoming a burlesque artist.

Some of this material is familiar, of course, from a dozen mid-life crisis dramas. Yet all of it comes with a savage, truthful De Angelis twist that fairly takes the audience’e breath away, before making them shout with laughter.

Pauline Knowles and Molly Vevers turn in a superb pair of performances as Hilary and Tilly, with fine support from Stephen McCole and Richard Conlon in the two leading male roles; Cora Bissett’s middle-class-Glasgow accented production features a stunning playlist of iconic post-1970’s music, as one scene gives way to another. And in the end, a kind of peace returns to Hilary’s once-happy-home; a peace dogged by economic insecurity, ideological disappointment, and the fact of looming old age, but also softened by the knowledge that, as Hilary puts it, “Life is very precious. You don’t just want to end it all because you’ve got a grey hair.”

JOYCE MCMILLAN

Until 12 November