My Child / One Good Beating

Rekindle Theatre are an up-and-coming company who had success with their recent production of The Breathing House, a fact they are very forthcoming with in their current publicity.

It is rather difficult to think of them using this current production in the same breath a few months down the line.

There is a dramaturgical link between the one-acts My Child and One Good Beating: each looks at stormy parental relationships. However, the gulf in quality between the two is stark, to say the least, and makes one wish they were presented as two separate productions rather than on one bill.

Second act One Good Beating is by far the better of the two. Linda McLean’s play is a short but rather compelling piece about two adult siblings confronting their abusive father, whom they’ve got locked up in a shed. The production itself isn’t brilliant, but it is good enough, with functional staging and three solid performances.

What isn’t good enough is My Child. Upon watching this production, one question occurs: why bother staging it? Mike Bartlett’s play, about a custody battle between a divorced couple, is so ridiculous and tedious that it comes across, at best, as trite soap opera. It has unlikable characters who speak cliché-ridden lines that function only to push the rather stupid plot along.

It’s impossible to care or root for anyone, and director Bill Wright and his company bring nothing to this DOA of a play, resulting in a production that clocks in at 45 minutes but feels like hours.

In these tough economic times, one wants to be supportive of new companies, but if Rekindle are going to survive, they have to make sharper productions of better plays.