Jumpy review, Duke of York's Theatre

Come whine with me

Jumpy is a chattering class dinner party turned into a play.  It's like a sitcom being acted out in front of a live audience. It's a middle-brow, middle-class, middlingly interesting look at being the mother of a troublesome teenager. And of being 50.  If you placed it in a TV schedule, it would be somewhere between Ab Fab and My Family. Potential programme sponsors would range from Tena to Black Cohosh to Match.com.

At the play's heart is the exquisitely fine-tuned Tamsin Greig, an actress rolled out by central casting every time a call is put out for an intelligent woman with the natural look and sound of liberal England. She never even has to change her haircut. This would be a major problem were it not for her unerring ability to inhabit a role so that every expression is a story in itself worth five layers of script. That's particularly helpful when you have a script that lacks depth. In the best scene, writer April de Angelis has actress, Doon Mackichan, doing a burlesque routine as a horse. It's a killer, but completely spurious.

Bel Powley is the screechy teen in need of boundaries, but when your parents can't decide their own boundaries, you're way down the list. The play's unsatisfactory conclusion appears to be that previous generations of mothers who had no control over their reproductive systems or their financial well being, were harsh on their children; and this generation which has both are too soft on their children. And?

In conclusion: Jumpy is a good laugh, and looks at the travails of modern parenting with wit and verve, but its insights are hackneyed and there isn't enough bang for the huge bucks being charged for tickets.

References
Jumpy, tickets
Georgina Brown review in The Daily Mail