George Mann and Nir Paldi are a real-life couple who, as Bristol-based company Ad Infinitum, have been making shows for ten years. Not together. God no. That would be a disaster. Or so they tell us. And although this show, their first attempt at equal collaboration, isn't a total disaster, it definitely highlights all the tensions in their relationship.
Loosely, 'No Kids' is about the pair deciding if they want to have a child. But whereas gay marriage is a doddle, some heteronormative institutions aren't so easily entered into. A wittily imagined opener envisions how easy it would be if Nir could wake up pregnant one day and spawn a multilingual child genius who magically fulfils both of his fathers' most extravagant dreams for him. Of course, it's tougher than that. This performance ricochets between considering the ethical worries of surrogacy, the potential risks of adoption, and the environmental toll of having kids full stop.
It's fast-moving stuff, pepped up with dance breaks and rashes of Madonna-soundtracked silliness. But even though 'No Kids' premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, it still feels unfinished. It's jumbled, and repetitive in its reliance on a small set of storytelling devices: it doesn't really feel like these two guys have found a language to express themselves on stage.
The section on adoption feels like a particular misstep: because everything they represent is filtered through their own terrors, they present the system as this kind of Gestapo-style horror show, and adoption as a much-less-than-ideal option. And there's also a real weirdness to their obsessive fear that their unborn kid could grow up to be a bigoted thug. They keep returning to nightmare scenarios of their hypothetical son beating them up – fantasies that they only partly explore by talking about how they suffered homophobic violence as kids.
‘No Kids’ is built on a kind of circling, imaginative anxiety around parenthood that's rarely expressed, and that's worthwhile in itself. But I found myself longing for its performers to get outside of each other's heads, to reach for some real-world pluses to gay parenthood, as well as all this show's imagined minuses.
BY ALICE SAVILLE