GROAN UPS! ARTS THEATRE
It is a risky business to have the word ‘Groan’ in any play title. Alas and alack, ‘Groan Ups’ is far more groan than up – and not in a good panto way. Written and produced by Mischief Theatre, the team behind ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ has in this piece a real play that goes dreadfully wrong – and not at all in a funny way. It pains me to say so, but I find it really challenging to say anything good about this thin, often Benny Hillish smutty, badly written and even mildly offensive, over long, ‘comedy’. For what reminded me of a Year 9 improvised drama lesson, laughs were supposed to come out of the following: a constantly bullied, friendless child who grows up to be an adult version of his primary school persona (and yes who ‘hilariously’ threatens suicide in Act III), the same chap who as a teenie is cajoled into sticking his male member into the bars of a hamster cage, a comic-book promiscuous teenie girl who wants the boys to touch her breasts (are you laughing?)…I could go on if it were not for my sympathies with you dear reader.
The premise for ‘Groan Ups’ is simple (and far far from original). Three ages of human: ages 6, 13 and 30. The setting is a school room. We begin with five infants who tell us what they have done over the weekend. Such rib-tickling ‘wink-wink say no more’ lines as ‘My daddy says he would like to give her one’ is meant to reveal how funny the innocence of children can be when attempting to understand the adult world. It felt to me as if none of the writers had actually met a real-life child; it was as if the 1970s were back even though this play is but two years old. The five actors who played the kiddies worked hard – very hard – to bring off this misguided of scripts.
Then we are a few years on. The same kids are now 13 and on the verge of sex-fuelled teenage. Unfortunately, any attempt at creating 3-D characters were thrown on the bonfire of inanities: bellowed lines, melodramatic declamations and in the second half, farcical actions involving dead hamsters, jokes about pubic hair (the lack thereof) and stolen kisses. None of the five characters was remotely likeable or believable.
Apart from the annoying thinness of the characters (swot, dunce, class clown, boy-obsessed….) the narrative line was shallow and piecemeal. There is no discernible plot but rather a series of sketches. You can almost hear the writers in the pub saying ‘oh here’s another funny thing they could do’…There is a limit to our willing suspension of disbelief. In the three parts, the juniors become teenagers become 30+ adults. Now proper grown ups, nothing has changed in their lives – experience (if any) has taught them that the sum of one’s years are zero. Really? Growing up in this world never really happens. And it doesn’t happen only because the writers think that is funny. In this world, everyone is Peter Pan (if only there had been pirates!)
In the last section of the play, the ‘fun’ suddenly turns to sentimental slush. We are now at a school reunion with a marriage built on false pretences and a stomach churning ‘confession’ that all the bullied chap wanted since childhood was to be loved. Similarly another character reveals what everyone in the audience has known since the opening scenes – whisper it..he is and always has been gay. There was a strange silence in the audience. Was this meant to be funny? Were we really meant to feel something for these cartoon characters? Should we laugh? Or should we groan?
