It is Crucible policy to ensure that plays which caused a stir in the capital should be seen in Sheffield. So it is with Deborah Bruce’s frank, funny and slightly disconcerting exploration of female friendship, first produced at the Orange Tree last year, which the original director Charlotte Gwinner has been given a swift chance to reconsider.
Bea has returned from her adopted home in Melbourne to visit her old friends Kate and Alex. She’s left her husband and two young children behind, which seems a perfectly natural thing to do, until it transpires that she has no intention of going back to them – ever.
A lot of wine is drunk, tears shed, home truths broached and a lasagne spoiled. But beneath the slightly glib veneer of middle-class entitlement (it’s surprising how casually Kate grabs a laptop and books a couple of tickets to Australia without apparently making a dent in her bank account), there’s a quasi-Shavian moral comedy fired with resentment over one of society’s most glaring double-standards.
If a man chooses to walk out on his family, it’s accepted. Whereas if a women does so, she’s painted as a modern Medea who cannot even bear to have a Skype conversation with her kids. The difficulty, in dramatic terms, is that Michelle Duncan’s Bea remains largely detached and passive, while her bossy, flaky friends make all her decisions for her.
Bruce ramps up the pressure by setting the play in the hot, riot-blighted summer of 2011. It feels a bit incidental now, but does give rise to one of the best moments in the play when Charlotte Emmerson’s chaotic Alex is panicked by her mobile phone: “I’ve just had a text from Lewisham council,” she announces. “‘Do you know where your child is now?’ God, it’s like a ransom demand.”
- At the Crucible, Sheffield, until 14 November. Box office: 0114 249 6000.
