There is a certain predictability about drama genres these days, especially that which covers family members over a period of time. Thus A and B (let us call them Kenneth and Sandra) meet at a young age and react to each other. Fast forward a couple of decades and guess how well they’re getting on (of course, they have children by then).

Add another 20 years in Act Three and see how the original duo is coping with both their own space and that of their grown-up kids. Be slightly unsubtle and use a couple of music bridges to make the point about time passing (say: the Beatles and the Stone Roses). Is it fair to assume that not all has gone fantastically well between 1967 and 2011?

The tale is quickly told, to be understood by every baby-booming middle-class tippling couple there ever was: how d’you deal with the children while trying to maintain your own 1960s teenage values and beliefs?

Ken (Ben Addis) is at Oxford in 1967 and meets his older brother’s girlfriend Sandra (Lisa Jackson) on the night that the Beatles play All You Need Is Love on global television. Somehow you have the feeling they’re going to get it together.

And lo: in 1990, the middle-aged couple have made money enough to have a swanky home and wine and whisky on call. Son Jamie (James Barrett) is allowed to smoke at 14 and daughter Rose (Rosie Wyatt) has multiple huffs about boyfriends and hasn’t quite started blaming Mum and Dad for everything.

That comes another couple of decades on, when Rose, nearing 40, dramatically asks her parents to buy her a house, while Jamie has basically gone down the pan.

Ken and Sandra have rowed throughout, blamed each other for everything and tried to cover up their inadequacies by putting on masks of long-suffering. Unnecessarily, the play ends with them dancing to the Beatles as their daughter despairs.

My guess is that director James Grieve has asked the cast to play their characters as parodies: all dialogue is delivered in obvious declamatory style, which can only be to cover the banality of the story.

Would this play be better if performed rather more naturally? Not sure: it could be too trite. Rosie Wyatt comes closest to giving a performance of depth.

“Most of what you say has nothing to do with us”, she says towards the end of the play. My goodness: has any son or daughter ever said such a thing to their mother or father before?

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