Sperm donor drama that throws the baby out with the bathwater
Stories
National’s Dorfman Theatre
Nina Raine gave us one of the plays of the year last year in Consent, which examined – using a bold, judicious mixture of satirical mirth and unmediated pain – the legal system, rape allegations and the he-said, she-said vitriol of an imploding middle-class marriage. She has a knack for alighting on hot topics, a skill, too, for making us engage with affluent metropolitan characters of a potentially odious sort: the privileged and cocooned, the self-preoccupied.
She’s back at the Dorfman with a work that falls vexingly short of our now-raised expectations. A portrait of a childless, unattached woman on the verge of her forties desperately seeking impregnation, Stories finds Raine homing in again on a heavyweight issue and bringing to it a lightness of touch, but, while she delivers a bundle of laughs, the balance is misjudged.
Not only do we tire of the caricatured sperm-donation candidates that Anna, our persistent heroine, approaches, but the far too laboured evening throws out the baby with the bathwater and curdles the milk of our kindness in regard to this would-be mum.
The frustration is all the greater because, aside from continuing to display her knack for comic dialogue, Raine (who also directs on a trim stage bisecting the auditorium) is baring something intimate about her own life here. She has spoken about her decision to have a baby with an old university friend (“I sort of lost faith in fate”) and Stories is part-dedicated to the result of that lone manoeuvre: Misha (who took a minor, adorable supporting role in Consent). Yet it’s as if her seminal experience hasn’t been subject to enough cross-examination. We don’t see much in Anna beside biological panic, along with a lot of genteel pleading; that we should rejoice at the consummation of her quest is taken too much for granted.
The script is half-formed, then, but there’s not enough to invest in emotionally or brood over, ethically. As Anna, Claudie Blakley gamely endears us with fragile smiles and hinted-at sadness, capturing the summoned resolve, the sucked-up humiliation, the pained politeness mingled with non-pc asides. She can’t make us fully care about her plight, though. Sam Troughton works overtime conjuring the jittery younger boyfriend who jilted her and a cluster of man-children whose angst, selfimportance and ineptitude are so pronounced, you dread the thought of their dorkish potential offspring (and wonder why Anna doesn’t either).
Margot Leicester and Stephen Boxer provide perky sketches of blasé yet concerned parents and other manifestations of the older generation, while Brian Vernel delivers the standout moment in a speech offering the perspective of a man who grew up without knowing his anonymousdonor father. In the poignancy of that you glimpse the play this might have been. After the limping spectacle of David Hare’s latest, I’m Not Running, isn’t it clear that the NT’S new writing