Surrogacy tale is painfully laboured
Bodies (Upstairs, Royal Court Theatre) Verdict: Maternally miserable ★★✩✩✩
MANY women will relate to the heroine of Vivienne Franzmann’s play about surrogacy.
The frustration at not being able to bear your own children must be tough. But to really win our sympathy, Franzmann’s play needs a bigger, fatter personality at its centre, someone who’s more conflicted.
What we get is an earnest, volatile, obsessive TV producer who’s emotionally stifled and eaten with envy. No one wants themselves to be seen like that, and even if that is what’s going on inside, they will often project something more fun-loving.
I certainly found my sympathies wavering in the story of middle-class Clem, who has a Russian woman’s egg fertilised by her husband and planted in the uterus of a poor Indian woman for £20,000.
Even so, Franzmann’s play does occasionally scratch the surface of serious moral, social and psychological issues. It also shuttles boldly in space and time between gestation in India and interaction with an imaginary teenage daughter in London. The elephant in the theatre, however, is why not go for adoption?
Jude Christian’s tidy production is smartly presented on Gabriella Slade’s set design which looks like an IKEA plywood show home. Intermittent film projections and having the Indian surrogate painting the walls of a new nursery only serve to upstage the action elsewhere.
Actor Justine Mitchell is impressively subsumed by Clem’s febrile neurosis, but the colour of the acting lies beyond her. Philip Goldacre is vivid as Clem’s disabled father muttering occasional scorn and Lorna Brown is beautifully insouciant as his wryly amused Nigerian carer.
Otherwise Franzmann’s characters are not allowed to mount a serious challenge to Clem’s enervating fertility fantasy.