PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

It was never going to be dull. Following its London residency last year, National Theatre’s man-of-the-moment Mike Bartlett hands his sweeping macro drama to director Rupert Goold (he of Stratford’s lurid, RSC/Patrick Stewart-starring ‘Merchant of Vegas’ and last year’s triumphantly colourful swatting of US capitalist excess ‘ENRON’) for a scintillating tour of modern anxieties and our ever pervasive fear of impending apocalypse.

The responsibility for navigating a 500-odd year timeframe (the action occurs between the 1960s and the year 2025) rests with three sisters and their brilliant, though professionally compromised scientist father. He’s seen the future, you see, and it’s not looking good.

But this is no Disaster Play per se, more a tickertape of our customary contemporary woes: global poverty, dubious coalition government, immigration, financial recklessness and climate change all unfold around the divided family each irretrievably sinking into their own coping mechanisms.

Tracy-Ann Oberman is excellent as the eldest sibling and ambitious Lib Dem politician Sarah, ferociously combative at work, far less anchored at home; wandering wide-eyed middle sister Freya (Leah Whitaker) wrestles less convincingly with her imminent motherhood and deep-rooted dad issues; while the youngest, Jasmine (Lucy Phelps), steals the show as the hedonistic, straight-talking, ouzo-swilling burlesquer who misses her mum.

It’s a total joyride – the criss-crossing of scene changes, quickfire dialogue and modern pop soundtrack (Portishead, Marina and the Diamonds, Coldplay and Goldfrapp all get an airing) grounds the breakneck play very much in the now, and despite clocking in at a challenging three hours plus, the superfluous exchanges and characters are surprisingly few.

Perhaps if you could level one criticism at ‘Earthquakes…’, it’s that despite the hurly-burly, wide-angle documentary and unashamedly flashy production, it occasionally yearns for a stronger dramatic human core which emerges only fleetingly as the girls’ father Robert (Paul Shelley, on imperiously didactic form) dispatches some novel parenting advice which returns to haunt him during the very otherworldly (and, arguably, disingenuously neat) conclusion. (Joe Spurgeon)

Copyright Joe Spurgeon 2011

Pic: Tristram Kenton