The Stage

My Child

Published Thursday 10 May 2007 at 13:10 by Alistair Smith

Walking into the Royal Court’s main auditorium at the moment is rather like entering a Jubilee Line Underground carriage - it has been totally transformed. Gone is the seating, along with the stage, and instead you either sit at raised metallic wine bar tables or stand holding on to rails, as if on a tube.

In a strange amalgam of the modern world, the walls are covered in advertisements, while Starbucks coffee cups are scattered on tables at either end of the oblong carriage. Performers stand around, initially almost indistinguishable from the audience. In fact, so much so that when a mobile phone went off on press night, I thought the embarrassed audience member might well be a plant.

The play itself, Mike Bartlett’s first full-length effort, is rather like a stage version of Philip Larkin’s famous poem This Be The Verse, dealing with what it means to raise a child. Should you teach them how to succeed, or how to be a decent human being? Indeed, are these two aims incompatible?

Ben Miles, as the father who takes radical action when he finds himself being phased out of his son’s life, is superb and the rapport he strikes up with his awkward, unenthusiastic and wrestling-obsessed child, is entirely believable.

Bartlett’s play is a promising debut - well formed, nicely contained and, above all, a satisfyingly fresh theatrical experience. It’s certainly worth a trip down to the Court, even if only to see how Miriam Buether’s design has radically altered the space.