Review Bodies

Peter Barker is intrigued by a play tracing a global transaction which a London couple hopes will bring them the child of their dreams.

Bodies
by Vivienne Franzmann

Great Expectations
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Clem and Josh are desperately trying for a baby. However the well-off middle-class, middle-aged media couple are paying for the creation of a baby who would not otherwise exist.

The egg donor comes from Russia, while across the world an impoverished woman in India is the surrogate mother carrying the egg fertilized by Josh's sperm.

Bodies is a new play from Vivienne Franzmann examining the purchase of parenthood and the bringing to life of another human being with a genetic connection as a paid-for hybrid commodity.

Unable to conceive their own child, Clem and Josh allow their longing for a family dictate their actions without regard for the welfare of and consequences for others around them. 

These others include surrogate mother Lakshmi in India, Salma Hoque skilfully managing wide-ranging shifts of emotions, and Philip Goldacre's touching portrayal of Clem's cantankerous, stroke-stricken, trade unionist father who nevertheless sticks to his socialist values.

Many would regard the situation of the London couple (Justine Mitchell and Jonathan McGuinness) as a first world problem, motivated by dubiously selfish concerns. Unlike the Sex Pistols' song of the same title, the problem and solution is not forced on Clem.

Scientific advance is now a gateway to unprecedented arrangements and Franzmann's play examines where respect for our own and other people's bodies begins and ends.

It also poses the question about what personal fulfilment in our advanced technological age should mean.

The play provides a skilful framework for these questions and issues with a poignant fantasy as a dramatic device. Clem meets and speaks with the unborn child, a young woman of 16 years in a sure-footed, striking performance by Hannah Rae.

This daughter can cross psychic and physical boundaries, moving from Clem's English house to the dormitory of the surrogate Indian mother. The child becomes like an inverse ghost of Hamlet's father, also a victim of other people's actions, but looking to the family's future instead of the past.

Within such an emotionally overwrought situation,  there is nevertheless state intervention,  counterbalancing the illusion that our deepest desires, consumerism and the market are the only factors in a seemingly endless case of supply and demand.

Director Jude Christian, designer Gabriella Slade with Joshua Pharo on lighting  convincingly stage digital connectivity enabling clear changes of scene and context in a fast-moving plot.

Slade's beige softwood set with sliding doors makes for an effective contemporary backdrop with a round window smoothly transforming into a screen with videos created by Meghna Gupta.

However the play at 90 minutes, despite cuts to the published text,  does seem overlong. There is also some clunky dialogue and the final pay off felt confusing, but Franzmann does have the ability to spring surprises and drive the story forward.

The affluence of Clem and Joshua's life, the exploitation of the less advantaged at home and abroad, fertility, loss, and motherhood are all deftly handled. It's an amber/green light for a compelling tale which impressively mines the social and emotional implications of surrogacy.  

Review Years of Sunlight (Preview)

Years of Sunlight
by Michael McLean

The Likely Lads
https://theatre503.com/

One of TLT's relatives once  worked in Port Sunlight, a factory and a model village providing comfortable housing for its workers in Cheshire, near to Liverpool, built late in the 19th century. This parallelled similar Victorian projects such as Cadbury's Bournville and the much earlier New Lanark in Scotland.

In a sense, this part of the TLT clan was going backward in time. For before Port Sunlight, he and his new wife  had first moved into a maisonette near London in one of the many New Towns, part of a post Second World War attempt for a planned welfare state, set up not by a company but by national and local government.

So it was with her curiosity piqued, TLT parked her thespian jalopy at the Theatre503 for a preview performance of Years of Sunlight. This is set not in Port Sunlight,  but a post World War II overspill Lancashire new town for Liverpool workers, namely Skelmersdale.

The play charts the lives of friends over 30 years until 2010: Paul (Mark Rice-Oxley), the child of an Irish  single mother Hazel (Miranda Foster) conceived in Ireland, and artistically talented Emlyn (Bryan Dick).

Emlyn lives in a children's home before being fostered on the same estate where Hazel, who watches out for him, and Paul live. Both Paul and Emlyn are children, we learn eventually, of the New Town and both have a chance of upward mobility, skewed in various ways.

The play itself works its way backwards in time and, despite this structure, feels much like a soap opera. However  writer Michael McLean intelligently works in a more explicit entertainment and pre-Murdoch newspaper industry theme.

Paul's golf-playing printer stepfather Bob (memorable John Biggins), ultimately hobbled in a fate reflecting his earlier charitable activities, could equally have stepped out of as a boss in a 1950s' 'angry young man' novel or a Dickens' tale..

In addition, threaded alongside this, as far as we could tell, there is a subtle subtext drawing in the impact of arts'  funding  on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Seared Productions in association with the Theatre503 presents Years of Sunlight. The drama is directed skilfully by Amelia Sears with great clarity, aided by Polly Sullivan's deft, clever design. A granite pillar, a raised platform at an angle on the stage has cloud-like painterly daubs on either side. Video news projections reflect the changes over years, real-life and artistic fracturing.

This is a modest, rewarding play, a little schematic at times, but with plenty of potential - we did feel it might have another life on screen. The 75-minute, one-act drama has an outstanding performance by Bryan Dick as Emlyn with strong performances also from Mark Rice-Oxley and Miranda Foster.

At the same time, without wanting to give anything away, the new town theme did not always feel organically knitted in. So it lacked the final  lump-in-the-throat poignancy and feel of lost promise for which it was clearly striving in the preview we saw.

At its best Years of Sunlight reflects in its story the sly ambivalence found in contemporary narration of genuine 1960s' Skelmersdale Development Corporation film footage, shown in the play, promoting the brave new world. It's an  amber/green light for a tale of good intentions and sad outcomes.