{"id":1600,"date":"2018-10-23T16:24:29","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T16:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1600"},"modified":"2018-10-23T16:24:30","modified_gmt":"2018-10-23T16:24:30","slug":"six-characters-in-search-of-a-babymother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2018\/10\/six-characters-in-search-of-a-babymother.html","title":{"rendered":"Six Characters in Search of a Babymother"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Sam Troughton and Claudie Blakley in rehearsals for Stories a new play by Nina Raine, also directed by Raine at the National theatre.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s pure coincidence that the royal pregnancy of the Duchess of Sussex was announced only a little before the curtain went up on Nina Raine\u2019s new play, Stories<\/em>, at the Dorfman auditorium of the National Theatre. But the news couldn\u2019t be more apt, as the 37-year-old American former actress has much in common with Anna (Claudie Blakley), the heroine of \u00a0the play \u2013except the pregnancy. Anna is in her late thirties, and desperately wants a child, but unlike HRH, she lacks a source of the sperm required to conceive one. Like the former Ms Markle, Anna does something (unspecified, though there\u2019s an implication that she\u2019s a casting agent) in show biz, and is as warm, engaging, intelligent and prejudice-free as the Duchess appears to be. (The mixed-race Meghan doesn\u2019t even seem to share the British nervousness about ginger-haired people: she after all married one.)<\/p>\n

Anna, though, is still waiting for her Prince Harry to come. She has behind her a string of relationships, of which the most hopeful, Tom, is younger than she, but shares her interests, and seems at first appearance in the play (which is in Scene Three, when Anna is aged 38) to be equally broody. But at the end of the scene, wearing his running clothes, he tells her how much he loves her \u2013 as he abandons her.\u00a0 Anna is 40 when the play opens, brilliantly,\u00a0 in the \u201cbachelor pad\u201d of Felix, a gay art dealer; it takes a few minutes to understand that he has agreed to be Anna\u2019s sperm donor \u2013 and until Scene Eighteen to realise that Scene One was a fast forward: that Anna is a year younger in Scene Two, when she is with her brother, Joseph and their parents, searching her laptop for images of commercial sperm donors.<\/p>\n

The back story is that of\u00a0 the four other men who have let her down, of varying ages, professions and with different accents: Lachlan is a young Irish actor; Danny is a Sarf Londoner with hip-hop gestures and ambitions, innit? Corin is an aging, mostly posh-speaking director with the fame that goes with the chutzpah to have told Woody Allen to tone down his ad hoc dialogue on the Holocaust; and Rupert, a gay man with a partner, takes last-minute flight, urged on by the councillor all three have consulted. Tom\u2019s baulking is the last straw, which is why Anna has now turned to the Internet to find a \u201cbabyfather.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides the opening reveal of this tough-love comedy, Ms Raine\u2019s genius touch is that all six men are played by the same actor. The magnificent Sam Troughton manages to vary not only his speech, but also his body-language for each role. We have six characters in search of a babymother, and all fail to come good \u2013 they are, despite their evident differences, all alike in their masculine fears of commitment, an ingenious homage to Pirandello. On the other hand, despite the character Anna\u2019s resemblance in a few respects to both the Duchess of Sussex and the playwright (herself a recent mother), we learn little about her. We don\u2019t know her job or her tastes (for the most part) in anything but men. She\u2019d quite like a black West African babyfather, but she fears that might be an unkind, additional burden to bear for a single-parented, donor-conceived child. Would she have the imagination to make up the story that would explain all this to a toddler? In Stories<\/em> this character, Anna, spends a good bit of time reading or inventing bed-time tales for the \u201cbetween six and ten years old\u201d Girl, the daughter of her old friend Beth. The Girl, played beautifully by Katie Simons at the opening night, also seems to become Anna\u2019s shadow, as in Scene Eleven, when Anna is given the brush off by Lachlan:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He turns, about to go. The little GIRL speaks directly to <\/em>LACHLAN.<\/p>\n

GIRL. But you haven\u2019t said yes or no.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Something similar happens in Scene Twelve, when the Girl seems to speak a line of Anna\u2019s dialogue four times, following a line spoken by Anna herself, including the interval curtain line, \u201cGIRL (after her)<\/em>. I don\u2019t have anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

And again, at the penultimate Scene Nineteen, which is the death of Natasha, a Holocaust survivor who was once Anna\u2019s landlady, the Girl is involved \u2013 though it is not obvious to me whether the little Girl is her shadowing Anna or Natasha. Natasha is a problem character, in any case \u2013 of course, she represents the fact of death, in this play that interrogates birth, life and death; but dramatically she feels a touch superfluous to me. I\u2019m tempted to say the same about the role of the Girl; but on reflection I think the problem is that the role makes impossible vocal demands on an actual child\u2019s voice, as her shadow-comments are not only adult in their matter, but need also to be in their manner. For the sake of the drama, these lines need to be projected at the level of an adult voice, and that is asking too much of any but a few of the child actors I\u2019ve ever seen \u2013I can only think of Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney and Macaulay Culkin. (More puzzling is why Anna feels she needs to make a baby, rather than adopt one? Isn\u2019t there something essentially selfish about wanting to bring up a fatherless child that is genetically half-related to you, when you could be saving an unrelated life? This is a question not touched on in the play, but surely raised by a moment\u2019s consideration of Anna\u2019s situation, and is probably part of Ms Raine\u2019s intention, for though Anna is the protagonist of Stories<\/em>, she is by no means heroic.)<\/p>\n

These are tiny flaws, as Raine\u2019s dramatic skills are epitomised in this play, as is her superlative flair for comedy. There are a lot of laughs in the impeccable in-the-round staging at the Dorfman, with designer Jeremy Herbert\u2019s sliding sets and Bruno Poet\u2019s striking lighting. Ms Raine herself directs, with the verve and brio we\u2019ve come to expect from her productions. The odd thing, though, is that this is a drama that reads as well \u2013 better sometimes \u2013 as it plays.\u00a0 In the hustle-bustle of the stage, you inevitably miss a few lines \u2013\u00a0 and not just the Girl\u2019s \u2013for the fullest expression of playwright Raine\u2019s wit, you occasionally need to see the text. This does not detract one little bit from her command of stagecraft: even though her script\u2019s few stage directions leave plenty of room for the person who directs the revivals of Stories<\/em> \u2013 of which I expect there will be many.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Of course, it\u2019s pure coincidence that the royal pregnancy of the Duchess of Sussex was announced only a little before the curtain went up on Nina Raine\u2019s new play, Stories, at the Dorfman auditorium of the National Theatre. But the news couldn\u2019t be more apt, as the 37-year-old American former actress has much in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1600","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogroll-2","7":"category-elsewhere","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-pO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1600"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1604,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions\/1604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}