Bumping along

Hard to know where to start with On the Shore of the Wide World. The title, maybe: a sweet, rambling, lyrical phrase made up of vacuous and seductive borrowings. Like the show. We open with Susan, played by Susannah Harker, waddling on stage, apparently up the duff. Her aggrandising tum operates as a sort of clock during the action. At two o’bump she is flirting with her builder, Peter. By five o’bump one of Peter’s sons has left home. By eight o’bump Susan seems on the brink of beginning an affair with him. But at nine o’bump the prodigal returns, Peter makes it up with his wife and the family gathers for a big cosy hug and a nice bag of chips. That’s about it.

Lancashire-born Simon Stephens has plenty of the skills a dramatist needs but they’re not very evenly distributed. He’s a brilliant conjuror of that highly artificial type of dialogue which TV has schooled us to accept as real. He is also terrific at creating characters who instantly ensnare your sympathy. But he has no originality and not nearly enough psychological insight. His tremendous knack for character and dialogue causes him to neglect the art of storytelling. His version of Stockport feels like a controlled habitat scented and sanitised for the stage. It never rains in this cheery northern wasteland but everyone smokes, rogues are always lovable, kids take drugs, teenagers are surprisingly mature and thoughtful, mums weep and shout and forgive, dads get angry for all the right reasons, grandparents have hearts of gold and posh birds are unreachably sexy. That’s about the size of it. When he deploys a big plot-device Stephens hasn’t the talent, or the sense, to keep it concealed.