Go to see Genesis Inc and you’ll soon be thinking of an exodus
Genesis Inc Hampstead Theatre
What is Jemma Kennedy’s sprawling, only intermittently edifying comedy about private fertility clinics doing on Hampstead’s main stage? The theatre has an ideal incubator system in its downstairs studio space, yet this ambitious summer offering seems to have been untimely ripped from that protective development process.
Whatever the reason, everyone’s a loser. A shame for the nine-strong cast, headed by a wasted Harry Enfield. A pity for the playwright, who has first-hand experience of the fertility industry, researched this lucrative (and, she implies, exploitative) branch of medicine, and evidently toiled hard. A worry for the director, Laurie Sansom, whose stock fell in May with Nightfall at the Bridge, and crashes further here. And a waste of time and money for the audience: an hour of Genesis Inc and I suspect a lot of people will be thinking of an exodus.
It begins well enough: Enfield, doing his comically stiff, empty-eyed and toadishly smiling thing, extols the virtues of his (titular) fertility treatment company – which is planning an IPO and embodies nirvana capitalism, where the money flows in regardless of total failure. Attending his clinic are thirtysomething couple Serena and Jeff, who are running out of money, time and love. There’s also businesswoman Bridget, who’s storing her eggs, and hopes that an old boyfriend, Miles (Arthur Darvill), now a closeted gay teacher in a Catholic school, will fertilise one – so she gets in on the stock market flotation.
That’s enough to be chewing on, you might think, but Kennedy risks a wildly uneven tone as she tilts between levity and heartbreak. She throws in a bit of kitchen-sink drama (Jeff is a care worker to a woman paying her partner to abstain from domestic abuse) and hallucinogenic whimsicality that might have been spawned by Tony Kushner on an off-day.
There are cameos for old-man Abraham, Marx, God, Susan Sontag, and the Hindu mother goddess Shakti, as well as a talking vagina, ovary and womb (warm, soothing voice-work from Jenni Murray of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour).
Contrivances breed like rabbits, and coherence evaporates. Jess Curtis’s ugly, cumbersome, multi-tiered set often distances us from the cast but, at times, you still see far too much.
Avoid like the biblical plague. Until Jul 28. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com