Jemma Kennedy’s play about the IVF industry stems from personal experience. Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the world’s first test-tube baby, the piece is also timely. But, while Kennedy’s comedy has some sharp things to say about the commercialisation of conception, it aims wildly at too many targets and, at two and three-quarter hours, cries out for dramaturgical treatment.
In attempting to take us all round the subject, Kennedy weaves together a number of stories. Serena and Jeff are a fraught young couple who, having exhausted the limited IVF possibilities of the NHS, go to the expensive private clinic that gives the play its title. Meanwhile Bridget is a 40-plus banker who, having placed her own frozen eggs with the same firm, now arranges for it to be floated on the stock market. To complicate matters further, Bridget is deeply attached to Miles, a gay teacher and old college chum whom she longs to be her sperm donor.
Satire demands focus on its chosen topic and, as long as Kennedy sticks to the privatisation of reproduction, her play works. We are reminded that firms like Genesis Inc depend on underfunding of the NHS, offer a limited success rate and profit from biological dysfunction.
But Kennedy veers off in all directions. An abused mother tells her social worker that she pays her partner to stop beating her. We see the problems faced by the impecunious Miles in attempting to join the property ladder. There are also fantasy scenes involving the Old Testament’s Abraham and Sarah, Karl Marx and Susan Sontag.
What makes the play so frustrating is that Kennedy clearly has something to say and has a gift for comedy. Even if a scene where a baby monitor is left open and broadcasts a confessional chat between Bridget and Miles has echoes of Alan Ayckbourn’s Confusions, it is still passably funny. An episode where Miles’s clinical masturbation is aided by thinking of David and Angie Bowie also raises chuckles. But even there Kennedy has Sontag pop up to deliver a little homily on the significance of the word “seminal”. In trying to tackle the linguistics of infertility, the double standards applied to men and women and the iniquities of late capitalism, Kennedy simply tries to cram too much into one play.
Jess Curtis’s design is as unfocused as the play and Laurie Sansom, as director, has failed to apply suitable rigour to the text but the actors work with a will. Laura Howard as Bridget brings out the dilemma of the working woman forever postponing conception and Arthur Darvill lends Miles a baffled, musical charm. Ritu Arya and Oliver Alvin-Wilson as Serena and Jeff embody the anxiety of young marrieds and Harry Enfield, though underused, exhibits the bland pieties of the money-making fertility doctor. But, although there is a good play buried inside Kennedy’s text, it still awaits excavation.
- At Hampstead theatre, London, until 28 July. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
