Of course the problem with taking this sort of thing seriously is that you're not supposed to: this was at heart something like an ELO jukebox musical, for heaven's sake, playing across the street from Bat Out of Hell: The Musical at the ENO. Yet if I had to think of a paradigm for class immobility, it would be something like this performance. That's not in any sense to knock the quality of acting, script, production, musicianship, or anything else: this was a talented cast and production, the result of a lot of time and craft.
And in a sense that's my problem with this, an account of a rollicking day in the life of a number of sexually omnivorous but by all accounts future-deprived Scottish schoolgirls. These certainly are not characters in need of a lecture of mindfulness: their moment is everything. One seems to be dying of cancer, while the others seem fated to what happens to the unpensioned classes under late capitalism. Even the most conventionally middle-class character, the lone fated university-goer, seems (not to give anything away) fated for at the very least turbulence on the way there. I worry that I'll wind up sounding like David Brooks, or Matthew Arnold or somewhere: less fornicating, gels, and more books, and you too can ascend the declining heights of middle-class stability!
It's just that everything that brought everyone to the moment of performance, cast and crew, is precisely the sort of thing none of the characters in this play are allowed: study, focus, and time to develop. These are all characters who would likely have had difficulty attending a West End show, and no chance at all of performing in one. Or, at the least, this is what the play seems to suggest: even those characters with future plans, of one sort of another, see those fall apart over the course of the events described.
It also feels supremely odd--at this moment in British culture's frankly leery focus on guarding the sexuality of pre-adults--to watch a play about middle teenagers constantly having sex, to the frequent peril of their future lives. If you go to the theatre enough in London you'll see the world sort of array itself before you to perform: Argentines, Cubans, and now it seems precariat Scots, all affirming how often they get laid. This feels unsatisfactory somehow as the narrative of a shared global future. Moreover it feels like bad politics: we affirm the orgasms we share with the characters onstage--indeed, maybe we even envy them--but then go back to our more stable lives.
This performance felt faintly allegorical for society as it now exists. The theater-affording classes watch this sort of thing, and get to really enjoy it--and, indeed, this was an enjoyable performance. (You could buy sugary drinks in the lobby, to go with the on-stage sambucas.) The classes depicted, meanwhile, get the moment of performance, but no future; and the training necessary to get a performer to the West End level keeps any too-intrusive elements of actual post-working class life from getting into the mix.
There's a particular sort of rickety British theatre of the 1960s that tried to show alternatives, or at least a space of critique, of these sorts of things: Arnold Wesker's Roots does a lot of working in my thinking, as does Shelagh Delaney. And these plays are full of ham-handed moments of class transcendence or the failure thereof. But the very slickness of this play made me honestly nostalgic for that sort of thing: for the gesture, hewn out of a 1950s entertainment industry every bit as hostile to class critique as this one, towards lamenting and acknowledging structural problems. There are astonishing moments in this--it is a very fine production, and you should definitely go see it if you like this sort of thing. But a week on I feel queasy about this in a way I hadn't anticipated.
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