For a comedy, Jumpy paints a very bleak picture of womanhood. Motherhood, marriage, sex, body-image, self-worth… playwright April De Angelis depicts women in a permanent state of confusion.
Whether you agree with her analysis or not, De Angelis’s play provides perfect comic fodder for the characters within it. Tamsin Greig plays Hilary, a 50-year-old literacy worker who has panic attacks on the tube and uses wine as a nightly de-stress from the traumas of her family relationships: the blandly functional one she has with her husband Mark and the entirely dysfunctional one shared with her 15-year-old daughter Tilly. While Hilary goes through these and other crises – worry about impending redundancy, concern about turning 50 – she isn’t helped by the fact she’s surrounded by others going through their own, including best friend Frances (Doon Mackichan), who is desperate to prove she still has sex appeal, and Tilly’s boyfriend’s father Roland (Richard Lintern), whose marriage breakdown sparks some desperation of his own.
While the situations provoked by these crises provide a lot of humour – including a totally unrealistic but hilarious burlesque show by Frances, complete with whip and nipple tassels – it is the mother-daughter relationship that lies at the heart of the piece. This theme is tackled elsewhere in Theatreland at the moment, by Mike Leigh 50s-set Grief at the National Theatre. Perhaps this goes to show that the chasm between Hilary and Tilly is nothing new, even if the demands of modern living place additional obstacles in the way. While Tilly is welded to her iPod and mobile, her father Mark brilliantly highlights the generational gulf when he says “I used to play with a stick.”
But the main issue causing problems between mother and daughter is sex, and it is here where De Angelis starts painting in bleak brushstrokes. While Tilly’s boyfriend Josh is viewed by father Roland and his cold fish of a wife, Bea, as simply a young man exploring his sexuality, it’s Tilly who is branded a slag on Facebook. Of course it is also she who must bear the consequences. At the other end of the age gap, Frances’s sense of self-worth only comes from feeling sexually desired and attractive, while Mark unabashedly displays the stomach that’s now stretching last year’s T-shirt. Stuck between them, Hilary veers from half-hearted stoicism to depressed self-consciousness as she tries to marry her present with the optimism and strength of her younger self.
These are not new themes, yet it’s slightly depressing that, in 2011, they still ring true. Nevertheless, they make for an entertaining evening in the hands of De Angelis, especially with Greig leading the cast. Mackichan and Lintern provide strong support, and if Bel Powley’s Tilly doesn’t quite gel with Greig and Ewan Stewart as her parents, maybe that only helps to highlight the unfixable breech between the generations.
CB