Family gatherings can be tense for even the most apparently harmonious households. So, bring together a pair of divorced parents and two grown-up children, who burningly resent them while specialising in bad life choices, step back and light the touch paper.
It’s a potentially promising – if hardly unfamiliar – premise for a play. But writer Stephanie Jacob’s comic drama lumbers itself with a fiddly structure that ends up testing the audience’s patience as much as Louise and Tom and Adam and Izzy get on each other’s nerves.
The clue is in the play’s title, ‘Again’. Each scene re-sets itself at a certain point, usually when one of the characters has stormed out, and re-plays itself along a slightly different trajectory. But this ‘Sliding Doors’-style storytelling falls apart by being erratic and unclear. There’s no ‘what-if’ to the fuzzy differences.
You could argue that these different takes are dramatizing the often contradictory and conflicting feelings that family members have towards each other. But, in practice, that translates in Jacob’s script into a series of jarringly exaggerated exchanges: people talk weirdly to each other, the lights dim and then it starts again.
Chuck in some childhood flashbacks and ill-defined time jumps among all of the instant replays and you get an over-stuffed play. Rather than illuminating family dynamics, the form creates a fidgety, restless atmosphere. The result pads out 20 minutes of plot to just over an hour and still feels too long.
There are a few amusing running gags and, occasionally, the characters do feel like actual people. But amid the nostril-flared, shouty acting that inflects director Hannah Price’s workmanlike production, it’s only Natasha Little as Louise, the mum, who really stands out. She pulls back from excess, in tight, taut gestures. She grounds ‘Again’ in something real and sad.