Birthing pains: Lisa Dillon (Lisa) and Stephen Mangan (Ed)/Picture by Johan Persson
Play: Birthday
Theatre: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Playwright: Joe Penhall
Review by Joy Francis
A pattern appears to be emerging in the recent plays of Joe Penhall. Haunted Child, his first play in four years, featured a middle class couple, a disintegrating marriage, an alienated child and a husband on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
In Birthday, his latest offering, we have a middle class couple, a disintegrating marriage, a troubled child and a husband on the verge…of giving birth.
Heavily pregnant Ed (played with great chutzpah by Stephen Mangan) is in a hospital bed. Stressed and red faced, he is upset that his wife Lisa (Lisa Dillon) has forgotten to bring his raspberry leaf tea.
Rubbing his protruding belly, he refuses to let her off the hook. “I asked you to do one simple thing, buy a box of fucking tea…and you’re so busy faffing about…”
Ed behaves as if Lisa has no idea of what being pregnant is like, despite her surviving a traumatic birth when their first child Charlie was born. This is the very reason why Ed put himself forward to have a baby at an understaffed NHS hospital specialising in male pregnancies.
Amid Ed’s moaning and demands, it is obvious that he is having second thoughts. Lisa swings from being supportive and patronising (“you are being very brave”) to angry and competitive (“I had a laparoscopy for you”) as Ed continually takes the moral high ground.
Penhall gets the audience hooked in the first half of the play with darkly funny, laugh out loud humour, which Mangan delivers with ease, backed by director Roger Michell’s effective pacing.
The role reversal isn’t subtle – Lisa is the main breadwinner and a bit of a workaholic. Ed seems to be using the pregnancy to assert his masculinity and self importance. No matter what Lisa says about her difficult pregnancy, his is “twice as hard”.
Bubbling under the surface is the unresolved trauma of the first birth and the worrying behaviour of their first born, Charlie. Instead of talking about it, they rip into each other and the lackadaisical African nurse Joyce, an on form Llewella Gideon, who repeatedly asks Ed if he has been induced, when he has.
As usual Penhall is trying to say a great deal in a short space of time. About the parlous state of the NHS, how having children drastically alters relationships, trapped grief, gender envy and cultural differences. They all get an airing, some more successfully than others.
Birthday makes no bones about how painful, scary and difficult giving birth is. The unnaturalness of a man being pregnant, from Ed’s artificial waters being broken through his anus, him not being able to have contractions and the inevitable caesarean, is forced home.
At one and a half hours with no interval, the play’s initial brisk freshness drains away three quarters of the way through, particularly after the birth, like a post natal slump. The ending, where this warring, fractious couple rapidly find their romantic spark, fails to sew up the many complex threads of their messy relationship.
These flaws aside, Birthday is still a thought provoking and entertaining experience. Go see.
Birthday is on until 4 August 2012.