Lucky Seven
Hampstead Theatre, London
I Caught Crabs in Walberswick
Bush Theatre, London
CLASS is a theme that spreads like a dark stain through British theatre. So, not surprisingly, it lies at the heart of two fresh debuts, which both glance at class, love and then at class again. In other respects, there is a world of difference between Alexis Zegerman’s Lucky Seven at the Hampstead Theatre and Joel Horwood’s I Caught Crabs in Walberswick at the Bush – one is a metropolitan comedy and the other a rural coming-of-age drama.
Zegerman’s play is a take on Michael Apted’s 1960s television documentary series which looked at 14 kids at seven-year intervals. To make it manageable, she chooses to have just three characters, upper-class Catherine, middle-class Tom and working-class Alan, and follows them from age seven to age 49. By shining the spotlight on them at different ages, she shows the ups and downs of their lives in a lively and amusing way.
The story is the story of Britain today: Jewish East-Ender Alan goes into the rag trade, becomes a Thatcherite, and then loses his shirt in a recession; swotty, and snotty, Tom suffers from depression, then rallies in middle age, when he manages to write a film script and marry a much younger woman; meanwhile, cut-glass accented Catherine follows a bout of punk rebellion with an advantageous marriage.
At different points in the evening, each of the characters decides to quit the television show, and media celebrity is characterised as “pornographic” and “voyeuristic”, but, typically, each of them relents. Cleverly, Zegerman juggles with the chronology of the scenes, which allows her to achieve some delicious ironies, while her zesty wit and confident dialogues deliver an entertaining evening.
Hampstead supremo Anthony Clark directs an excellent cast, with David Kennedy’s blustering Alan, Jonny Weir’s worried Tom and Susannah Harker’s charming Catherine, but only Alan has real substance. And although it seems churlish to accuse a comedy of not having enough depth, Lucky Seven offers little in the way of brain-food, apart from arguing that class is a determinant force and that, by the age of seven, we are already the adults we will become.
Similarly, Horwood’s I Caught Crabs in Walberswick shows what happens when two 16-year-old boys and a girl of the same age meet in deepest Suffolk. Once again, class is an issue. Wheeler is a bright boy from a nice middle-class background who looks set to go to university; Fitz prefers football to studying and has a lower-class father who can’t cope with being a single parent; and Dani, aka Daniella, well, she’s a cut above both of these two.
This 90-minute comedic odyssey shows how, one night before their final GCSE exams, the three of them go on a wild binge that involves all kinds of substance abuse and joy riding. What’s particularly impressive about Horwood’s writing is his confident handling of theatrical form, as two adult actors play two narrators, plus all the parents and adults involved in these teenagers’ lives.
Beautifully directed by Lucy Kerbel and featuring a committed cast, this bitter-sweet play ends on inevitable revelations and emphasises how class, rather than love, is likely to tear us apart. However, although both of these plays illustrate the depth and inevitability of the class divide, where are the plays that suggest how we can overcome it?
Aleks Sierz
About The Author
