JUMPY Royal Court Theatre

Who would want to be a teenager again? Who would want to be a parent of a teenager again? April de Angelis’s play is about the ever-widening generation gap. Her heroine is a 50-year-old middle-class mother, liberal, feminist, former Greenham Common campaigner, who is having a mid-life crisis. She is about to lose her job, her marriage is in the doldrums, and her 15-year-old daughter is sleeping with a 15-year-old boy. How she deals, or rather how she does not deal, with the daughter, the daughter’s pregnancy and the formidable mother of the boy who has made her daughter pregnant makes for some amusing scenes in which Tamsin Grieg is both comic and sad. Ben Powley, in a very mini skirt and ridiculously high heels, is the ultimate stroppy daughter and hilariously awful. Nina Raine’s production comes to a standstill when Doon Mackichan, in leather corset, black plumes and with black bouncing balloon and whip, performs a grotesque parody of a burlesque routine.