Jumpy - Melbourne Theatre Co

Overview

April de Angelis’ Jumpy is an ode to middle-age anguish, with its central mother figure, Hilary (Jane Turner) caught up in a growing sense of disempowerment. It’s a play that taxis around the runway for hours, makes several abortive attempts at taking off, and returns its audience safely to the departure gate.

What are the stakes at play here? Hilary’s fractious relationship with her daughter? Dissatisfaction with her mild, boring husband? The possibility of romance with another man, who’s somehow even more insubstantial and weak-willed than her own partner? There’s no reason that middle-class ennui can’t make for thrilling, vital and compelling theatre; after an hour I can’t escape the memory of Jumpy’s director Pamela Rabe performing in the same company’s 2009 production of God of Carnage. We’ve seen it before, we know it’s possible.

At one point in Jumpy, a gun is brought onstage only to be accidentally fired and quickly taken off. Is the conflict here the absence of one? Is drama something that these characters (and this audience) want to fetishise and control; to parcel out and ingest in safe communion?

As a comedy, the play’s banal humour trades in stereotypes that would be offensive if they weren’t so wilfully implausible:

“Have you lit a barbecue before?”

“I must have, I’m a man.”

Beyond these interchangeable, Men are from Mars jokes, the play’s teenage characters are hollow caricatures, phones always in hand, and often impossibly frank with adults about fake IDs and underage drinking.

Even the cheapest jokes can be forgiven. But Jumpy’s politics are just as painfully unconstructed. De Angelis’s female characters make wispy invocations of distant feminist protests in their youth, feelings that never run deeper than shoehorned references to Greenham Common.

It all adds up into a two-hour long shrug; the characters’ lingering feeling that this was not how our lives were meant to be.

Towards the end, the deflating revelation that explains the play’s title is enough to provoke physical despair for this text. It’s as if the emotional impact of Citizen Kane’s central "Rosebud" had been dissolved in a thousand parts of water like a homeopathic cure.

But the audience is pleased, filling the theatre with murmurs, gurgles, and harsh intakes of breath. They repeat lines to their neighbours, either in cloistered disbelief, or because they didn’t quite catch them the first time around:

“What was that?”

“She said mental-pausal!” 

I know that Jumpy is not meant for me, not to my taste; that it’s catnip for these MTC subscribers. And all of this criticism is no slight against a solid cast who actually acquit themselves well. In particular, it’s great to see some of the city’s exciting young actors like Dylan Watson and Tariro Mavondo make compelling mainstage debuts.

But when all those performances are in service to a turgid script, what’s the point? Menacingly, the company’s Artistic Director Brett Sheehy invites us to treat Jumpy as a “taster” of MTC’s season to come.