If you’ve ever looked in the mirror and seen a glimpse of your 10-year-old self, or glanced at your child and known exactly what they’ll be like in 20 years, then Tim Crouch’s play will have you wagging your tail. Not least because it features a riotous dog (the brilliant Amalia Vitale) who appears to have ingested The Tempest and some Beckett plays.
Your kids might enjoy it, too: Beginners is aimed at the over-nines and, like so many shows created under the Unicorn’s departing artistic director Purni Morell, it never underestimates its audience, whatever their age. It also never ignores the fact that growing up is hard to do, that our parents can fail us and that we lose them along the way.
Set during a rainy annual cottage holiday, the show suggests that the creativity of rising generations may yet save us all while the adults are down the pub. In the absence of grownups, the kids work out the hard stuff: how to rub along, cope with change and save the future.
Beginners operates like a mischievous yet emotionally textured murder mystery, but one without a body. It investigates instead how childhood gets killed. Stuck in a room with the dog are would-be ballet dancer Lucy (Pandora Colin), earnest Nigel (a very funny Neil D’Souza), newcomer Bart (Rob Das) and Joy (Jacqui Dubois), isolated by temperament but also her mother’s cancer. Occasionally, these characters are stalked by small shadows or ghosts.
The pleasure in Crouch’s increasingly funny play is in the way that, with designers Chloe Lamford and Camilla Clarke, he gradually enlarges the metaphysical and physical space. Watching it – and the play within the play that the children stage – we expand our belief in what’s possible and how we can overcome what life throws at us. Even if we still feel like beginners.
• At the Unicorn, London, until 15 April. Box office: 020-7645 0560.
