Ask the audience

Listen to the crowd. I often delay passing judgment on a show until the audience delivers its verdict. This is especially true of plays that appeal primarily to women. Genesis Inc. by Jemma Kennedy presents us with two infertile mums. Serena is a clingy worrier whose aloof boyfriend, Jeff, resents forking out thousands for IVF. Bridget, a cocky City power-dresser, is keen to get herself impregnated by her gay best friend. Serena and Bridget don’t meet until the final scene so the play feels like two separate dramas, poorly merged. The fertility clinic, Genesis Inc., is owned by the smarmy Dr Marshall (Harry Enfield). He wants the firm to go public so he hires one of his customers, cocky Bridget, to handle the flotation. ‘Conflict of interest,’ muttered my inner financial regulator. Already badly planned, the script wanders off into a mass of sub-narratives. Bridget’s gay friend tries to seduce a camp Catholic priest. Jeff has a fling with his yoga-teaching ex, who encourages her pupils to ‘bring their sufferings to the mat’. A social worker by trade, Jeff tries to persuade a battered wife, Sharon, to abandon her violent husband. Though irrelevant to the IVF theme, Sharon is a glorious creation. She’s a hard-smoking cockney cynic who bribes her husband not to beat her (‘it’s my money’), and believes that special educational needs are a hoax perpetrated by middle-class snobs to avoid admitting that their kids ‘are thick’. Clare Perkins (superb as Sharon) doubles as a gutsy Australian stockbroker who ascribes her success to ‘me snapper’. More narrative deviations appear. The writer keeps gathering up her characters like puppets and slotting them into odd-ball Monty Python routines. We meet Karl Marx, Susan Sontag, God, Abraham, a ‘talking vagina’ and other caricatures.

It’s unwise to shove surreal satire into a realistic drama because the comedy bits need to be ten times funnier than the material they’re interrupting.