Mike Bartlett’s gripping and ambitious tale of dysfunction and personal peril uses the imminent threat of an earthquake to symbolise impending climate catastrophe and the seismic emotional tipping points between three sisters, their father and their partners. Cressida Brown’s direction never lets the pot off the boil as the complex strata within Bartlett’s writing collide. The cast of Old Vic Theatre School graduates was never less than spellbinding, always in complete control of the work.

Robert Crannock (played by Al Maxwell as a young man, and Mark Milligan as his older, more embittered self) is a brilliant but emotionally stunted scientist who is corrupted by a big airline company early in his career. His three daughters have grown up with little contact with him, each ill at ease with themselves.

Eldest daughter Sarah, (Charlotte East), has become the Minister for the Environment in the Cameron-Clegg coalition government, and is committed to preventing any airport expansions. But at home the cracks are showing in her relationship with her unemployed husband Colin (Michael Dodds), who is showing signs of being brow-beaten and depressed.

Her wild-child youngest sister Jasmine (Sarah McCormack) has dropped out from university and has met Tom (Nimshi Kongolo), of Eritrean origin, who is on a mission to protest about the flight emissions that have contributed to the climate catastrophes affecting his family and fellow countrymen. Tom has unscrupulous ideas about how to blackmail Jasmine’s powerful sister. But later, very directly at the audience, he will deliver the most blistering cry of the night for climate action, confronting us all with our compliance in a broken system. 

But it is middle daughter Freya (Nancy Farino) whose pregnancy becomes the central metaphor to the play’s and the planet’s existential crisis. Is this increasingly threatening world a suitable place to bring a new child? Bartlett flips us back and suddenly forward in time to better reveal the fault lines between Freya’s feelings about her unborn baby, Emily (Olivia Edwards), and her child’s own despair for the world. All roads lead to a destiny on Waterloo Bridge before we are suddenly beamed up to the year 2525, when Freya ‘reawakens’ to claim a retrospective role as a climate prophet. Wow!

Central to the performance are the three sisters about all else revolves. East always convinced as the uber cool alpha-female minister; Farino’s Freya always projected the fragility the role required while McCormack’s Jasmine smouldered well as the rebel most in touch with her errant dad’s nature. Her role in reigniting her eldest sister’s husband’s self-respect was well observed and executed.

Oliver Wareham’s sound added to a tense expectant atmosphere, yet lifted the house with pumping rock on occasion, calling on Coldplay’s Viva la Vida as satirical relief. Angela Davies’ design was efficiently flexible – office becoming hospital becoming nightclub with little fuss, always helped by Chris Houseman’s ability to focus down on intimacy with his lighting.

By adding a metaphysical dimension to the play, Bartlett is arguably in danger of overegging an already loaded plot. That he wants to take it somewhere fantastical, almost sci-fi, is exciting, but potentially undermines the gravity of the earlier messages and struggles.    ★★★★☆    Simon Bishop   10^th November   2019