“A tense and disturbing hour of theatre and the questions it leaves behind are the kind that follow you home”
Every generation gets the dystopia it can afford to imagine, and for a cast of this age it arrives as a kitchen island, a bottle of wine and a joint bank account marked “under review”. Set in a 2031 Britain where euthanasia has been legalised and the cost of living has stopped being a crisis and become a condition, The Investment of a Lifetime asks four performers to carry big ideas on very little furniture.
The play is the first outing of Noted Productions, a female-led company formed by recent graduates of the University of Essex E15’s Contemporary Theatre course and it is a bold choice of debut drawing on euthanasia, helicopter parenting, youth unemployment, the cost-of-living crisis and the medication of the young all within a running time of under an hour. News-style voice-overs sketch a country in which prices are still rising, unemployment has reached fifteen per cent and nine million people are on antidepressants, before we settle into the kitchen of a seemingly comfortable family. Elizabeth and Jude are trying to trim their outgoings while their eighteen-year-old daughter Celeste weighs up her university offers. When Celeste’s girlfriend Lydia moves in following the breakdown of her own parents’ marriage, the household’s anxieties begin to tighten around all of them.
Taylor Roark, who also wrote the piece, plays Celeste with an appealingly dry cynicism that suits a teenager already weary of being managed – she is sharpest in the scenes where Celeste catches her parents contradicting themselves, delivering each correction. Her pessimism is convincing, yet the later stages call for a wilder, more frayed Celeste. Emma Hickman is one of the production’s most accomplished presences as Elizabeth, beginning as a brisk and faintly brittle mother and becoming distracted and later regretful. Thomas Drake makes a suitably argumentative and heavy-handed Jude, a father who raises his voice when he has least to say – the two of them play off one another with the irritation of a couple who have long since stopped listening. India Giles, as Celeste’s girlfriend Lydia, shifts between sulk and perk while her bewilderment as events grow stranger is so natural that she becomes the audience’s surrogate by saying aloud what the rest of us are thinking.
It is a thoroughly committed ensemble, and if the evening disappoints, the fault lies with the script. Some scenes tumble over one another and the ending arrives so suddenly that the crew has to start the applause for the audience – four performers this capable deserve the chance to let a moment sit as the horror promised by the title seems to have been left waiting.
For all that, there is promise in the way these four handle one another, and a sense that the sharper and stranger play this might have been is not far from view. A story about families weighing up what a life is worth is not one that fades quickly, and the performances ensure that it stays.
The Investment of a Lifetime runs at Drayton Arms, London, until Saturday 14th November.