Review

The Grown-Ups reviewed by Peter Crawley at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin.

After the boom must come the fallout, and a decade of steady prosperity has made Irish theatre no more optimistic about the state of the nation. As the Peacock finally reopens, Nicholas Kelly's new play The Grown-Ups takes a worst-case scenario view of contemporary Ireland, finding a flashy generation of thirty-somethings lost in rented apartments, theme bars and cafes; looking at their grande cappuccinos and deciding the mugs are half empty.

Discovered in a modern apartment - all temporary fixtures and no sense of history - the grown-ups of the title seem equally rootless. Alan (Jonathan Forbes) and Nicola (Leigh Arnold), a young professional couple, steadily stew in their status anxiety as he awaits a visit from his estranged sister, Amy (Fionnuala Murphy), a teacher recently sacked for assaulting a student, whose scandal may tarnish his own prospects.

It's a scene overloaded with exposition, swirling with off-stage character names, and miscommunication. What it needs is an anchoring sense of gravitas or a commanding force of nature . . . What it needs, in short, is Stephen Brennan.

Crashing in (literally) as a gregarious bar-room philosopher and Amy's boyfriend, Brennan decants wise words about Bacchanalian emancipation while routinely diagnosing our cultural condition: "It's a malaise," he intones.

Well, that explains it. But The Grown-Ups is so busy outlining symptoms of this malaise ("quarter-life" crises, feeling "out of the loop", freelance careers, rented apartments, teenage drinking) or deploying heavy-handed symbols of an apparently lost pastoralism (a bar called Arcadia, the portentous intrusion of birds, a conspiracy of ivy) that any sense of story becomes smothered; blurted out with the mounting confusion of a detective narrative: "Who gave you those bruises? Are you protecting somebody? What's this we all hear about June 21st?" Stembridge's production, staged in the traverse, boasts an attractive, uncluttered style, but it can't bring clarity to this growing morass of MacGuffins.

Accepting the superficiality of her picture-perfect Nicola, Leigh Arnold has nearly as much fun as Brennan. But while they all look their parts, neither Forbes's emasculated Alan, Murphy's strung-out Amy, nor Dan Colley's menacing youth Scott seem as comfortable - effectively they are asked to portray conditions rather than characters. Kelly's play is so concerned with glumly mapping out "this splenetic city with its heart wrapped in ice" that it succumbs to a similar disorder, tracing its messy surface but unable to thaw any fresh insights from its cold centre.