Mike Bartlett's baby-boomer satire covers 34 years in three acts, and has matured since its London premiere in 2012. It’s more playful than his weightiest stage works, like Albion or King Charles I, or his TV hit Doctor Foster. At times, it’s even downright sketchy.
But Rachel O’Riordan’s zesty revival benefits from eight years of perspective on the way one selfish generation cheated its children and grandchildren, and also from a wonderfully monstrous comic turn from Rachael Stirling.
She plays Sandra, who as a stoned hippy chick in 1967 chucks her strait-laced boyfriend for his louche student brother, Kenneth (Nicholas Burns). This is the clumsiest section, Bartlett briskly totting up the benefits these 19-year-olds lucked into: student grants, free love, idealism, dope, the Beatles.
Things ramp up when we fast-forward to 1990. The couple have forgotten their ideals, bought a house in Reading and mutated into the world’s most hilariously feckless parents. Their two sensitive teenage children are an audience to their self-involved marital dramas.
Stirling, now a pioneering female executive, stalks through the action in a cream trouser suit, necking wine and choffing fags, her hair sprayed into a rigid echo of Darth Vader’s helmet. Her command of gesture and phrasing is quite brilliant and she ages convincingly. Burns’s Ken is a more nebulous figure, his job a mystery. Ever-boyish, he’s forced into the role of straight man, though Bartlett gives him a few zingers.
In the third act, in 2011, the couple are securely laden with property and pensions, but aware of mortality. Arraigned by their daughter (impressive Isabella Laughland), Bartlett shows them defiant and entitled to the last, but also sweetly affectionate. The production is well-paced and very funny, which makes the few, pivotal narrative shocks more impactful.
Joanna Scotcher’s sets subtly evoke each period. Bartlett’s references to Facebook and Gumtree seem funnier eight years on. But no one could have guessed how uproarious a line about buying loo roll in 1967 would be today.
