Not all stepmothers are wicked. What 53two’s Christmas production might lack in the way of pantomime tropes, it more than makes up for in heart and song.
Indeed, its tightly-wound circle of a first act is a small miracle of musical storytelling; the grief that burdens Jessie and her father, bereft from the loss of a mother and a wife, is not for one moment diminished, but rather remains as spikily discernible as pine needles beneath the appealing tinsel of comedy.
When a play hinges on contrivance and coincidence to construct a skeleton from the bones of plot then its emotional tones must ring especially true, and such is the case with Bump(s), which asks us to accept the simultaneous pregnancies of Jessie, and Janine, the aforementioned stepmother, with due dates like the end of an advent calendar. That the audience is willing to suspend its belief like stockings on Christmas Eve owes much to the skill with which writer Megan Hickie’s opening act plumbs in the kitchen sink familiarity from which the dramatic flood of farcical unlikelihood bursts forth in its second. In this respect, the three actors called upon to inhabit the self-conscious clumsiness of adolescence – Beth-Lily Banks prickly and wounded as Jessie, Elliot Parchment-Morrison ineptly enamoured as Luke, and George Miller diffidently cocky as Nick – carry off recognisability without descending into caricature.
There’s a charm in their exchanges and interchanges that bears comparison with such teen movie staples as Bill Forsyth’s peerless Gregory’s Girl, and, less close to home, John Hughes’ Pretty in Pink. Indeed, in the triangle that plays out between Jessie, Nick and Luke, there’s a presentiment of the fate of Duckie in the latter; with Luke as his introvert echo, his devotion to Jessie apparently hopeless after a lie born out of his insecurity sunders their fledgling relationship.
The songs, by composer Ollie Mills, provide counterpoints of introspection in the ballads, and humour in the more up-beat numbers. On first listen, it’s the immediacy of the latter that latches into post-show memory, for all that the sad songs, often sung from the bench that Jessie associates with her mother, tug at the emotions in the moment. Nick’s school hall power ballad, spelling out his feelings for Jessie, because, in his words, “I’m a musician, I find it hard to keep my feelings on the outside”, would, with its tongue removed from its cheek, not wholly disgrace Bon Jovi.
Importantly, the company give every appearance of enjoying themselves, a sort of creative license which Dan Sheader, in his dual roles of Nige, drummer in Nick’s vanity project, and an unnamed but wonderfully laissez-faire bouncer, embraces with tremendous comic effect. This effervescence spills over like the pop from a bottle of supermarket fizzy wine in the song which celebrates Jessie’s underage night club foray, which seems to speak for the production itself when its chorus rhetorically demands, “What is like for, if not to drink on the dance floor?”
With respect to a production that merits so much good will, it is, perhaps, a little Scrooge-like to observe that the helter-skelter second act is not quite the equal of the first. Bridges that have been built once are taken down again to provide the scaffolding for comic conflict, and the twin pregnancies, already foreshadowed come to seem a little belaboured. Moreover, the ending is rarely in jeopardy from the moment in which Nick is caught in a lie, symmetrical with Luke’s before him.
Still, it is Christmas, after all, and in its finely-judged mixture of melancholy and hope, Bump(s) has captured the spirit of the season.
By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent
Main image by Shay Rowan
