Rockabye by Joanna Murray-Smith

Theatre, like sex – or in the case of Joanna Murray-Smith's Rockabye, the lack of it – can be a profoundly disenchanting and one-way affair.

It's a bleak, judgmental and love-less world that Murray-Smith's characters inhabit … dominated by the selfish, archly conceited, Edina Monsoon-esque, fading Diva Sidney (Nicki Wendt). Miss Wendt delivers a performance of great range, conviction and passion – even though she is saddled with one of the play's more grotesquely articulated 'ideas' (later laboured over in a scene between Miss Bobbit's Cook 'Esme' and Miss Atkinson's PA 'Julia'): that lesbians couldn't know what it's like to want children ... because they're lesbians.

Sexual politics, AIDS politics, politics generally, the nature of Celebrity, Race, colour, culture, cultural heritage, drugs, music, Punk, post-Punk, baby naming, fashion, movie stars, secrets, lies, career-manipulation, journalism, the media, the future of newspapers, greed, childlessness, homosexuality, same-sex parenting, Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot, even the scones on the kitchen bench, all feature in a play that, upon considerable reflection, appears to have failed to decide what it really wants to say, why it wants to say it, and to whom … never mind about why it's important we have to hear it.

Altogether too cluttered and shallow to be satirical and too glib and indecisive to be farcial, Rockabye is an undeveloped and over-written play that screams out to be Television and/or (given its London setting and English and European geographical and cultural references) aimed at the Popcorn Theatre-going UK audiences for whom it is obviously intended.

Rockabye ponders, swipes and labours its way almost interminably around the rights of a childless, ageing Celebrity to adopt an African Child versus the rights of African Children to die in their own country. There's also a Toyboy (Mr Frederikson), a cocaine-abusing Manager (Mr Piper, who also camps it up beyond recognition as a Groupie), an Adoption Agency Lawyer (Miss Newman in a measured performance of great authority), and a Journalist/Broadcaster (Mr Mzembe who does a stunning job, even with most of the clichés and all of the melodrama).

Miss Hayes' costumes are fabulous while Mr Phillips is on 'exit stage left enter stage right or glide in on the props' auto-pilot. Mr Thomson's design (with the exception of a marvellous bar and a wardobe) is similarly serviceable … save for the final reveal of the Sumner Theatre stage's full extent. Flying sets out of sight is a trusted and reliable old trick, but on this occasion especially, a most welcome one – primarily because it revealed the only truly theatrical instinct of the night. Sadly, it was also minutes from the end – and with a running time of two hours without an interval (despite what the program says) it's just far too much for far too little in return.

My incensed, childless, forty-something, straight, female 'plus one', whose searing anger and resentment had to be quelled (at great personal expense I might add) with much red wine and Japanese food afterwards, has since been unable to resolve her rage at being perfunctorily (and somewhat offensively) labelled as a woman "who forgot to have children" – not only in the play, but also again in that pesky, unreliable program.

There may well be a great play to be written about the differences between the human rights, hopes and aspirations of the Third World versus the paper-thin gaudy excesses of a Celebrity-obsessed, childless and lonely Developed World. But then again.

Geoffrey Williams

PREVIEW AND BUY THE SCRIPT HERE.

Pictured: Richard Piper and Nicki Wendt in Rockabye. Photographed by Jeff Busby.