Joanna Murray-Smith’s 2009 play Rockabye is currently playing at Factory Theatre in a production directed by Rob Kempson.  It’s an odd play.  Ostensibly it’s about an aging rock singer; Sidney Jones (played by Deborah Drakeford), who hasn’t achieved much for 20+ years and desperately needs her come back album to be a success before she’s written off as a has been.  She’s also obsessed with adopting an African baby.  We’ll come back to that.  She’s at the centre of a coterie of personal staffers and hangers on who are almost as shallow and self obsessed as she is.  There’s the manager; Alfie (Sergio di Zio) endlessly congratulating himself on sticking with Sidney rather than taking on a “hot sixteen year old”.  There’s boy-toy Jolyon (Nabil Trabousi) who has curtain phobia, a U-boat fetish and a big dick. Sidney’s every wish is the concern of her plummy lesbian publicist Julia (Julie Lumsden) who races around to locate the absolutely vital Peruvian wheatgerm or to send to Uzbekistan for a swatch of cloth to repair a button.  Only the cook/maid Esme (Kyra Harper) seems to have any connection to reality.

Enter what will turn out to be the two most interesting characters.  Tobias (Christopher Allen) is a young but inexplicably influential music journo who, apparently uniquely among the commentariat, likes Sidney’s come back album.  There’s also Layla (Shauna Thompson) who must determine whether Sidney is a suitable person to adopt an African orphan.  Much of the first half of the show deals with the various attempts to get favourable coverage for Sidney’s album before she departs on a tour of Germany, Poland and Belarus (where she is apparently still popular.)  But really 75 minutes of a woman so shallow that if you dropped a twenty ton weight on her there would be no splash is pretty tedious and it isn’t helped by being shown in an endless succession of short scenes separated by loud music and flashing lights.  By the interval my patience was wearing thin.

It completely changes gear after the interval.  Layla and Tobias (both African but brought up by wealthy parents) discover they knew each other at Cambridge and start an affair which produces a series of revelations that change the dynamic between Sidney, Tobias and Layla (explaining more would involve major spoilers).  This leads to a series of “confrontations” between Layla and Tobias, Tobias and Sidney, Sidney and Layla about the ethics of Europeans adopting African children and about the value/validity of aid that only leads to aid dependency and corruption.  But it’s very confused.  On one level it’s not so different from questioning the validity of the squire’s wife taking a basket of groceries to the poor folk in the village.  On another it’s the old Lenin vs Kautsky; revolution vs. reform debate.  Tobias doesn’t really seem to know where he stands.  On the one hand he seems quite radical, on the other he seems to believe that Africans should pull themselves up by their boot laces (if they have any).  Layla stands for the worth of individual lives rather than the “big picture” but still agonizes over whether to sign off on the adoption when it’s obvious that Sidney Jones isn’t fit to adopt a goldfish.

In case this isn’t didactic enough we get a series of cameos on the nature of parenthood and the “right” of people of different kinds to have children.  So Sidney, a single woman desperate for a child, is horrified that Julia is pregnant and proposes to bring up a child with her lesbian partner while Esme fantasizes nostalgically about a world of patriarchal fathers, dutiful wives and obedient children.  The ending is a cliff hanger but after two and a half hours plus of narcissism and undergraduate philosophy it’s hard to care.

It’s a shame in many ways as ARC have assembled a really good cast who squeeze out what drama and humour there is in the piece.  The chemistry between Thompson and Allen is especially good and real sparks fly when they get going.  Allen is also very good at portraying separate public and private personae.  There’s some humour too in the scenes between Traboulsi (a hilarious summary of Das Boot is a highlight) and Lumsden; much of it focussed on the travails of dealing with Sidney.  Drakeford’s portrayal of the aging rock diva has it’s moments too, though like Di Zio’s Alfie it tends to be fairly overwrought.  But that, I think has more to do with the writing than the acting.  It’s a brave effort but it’s not enough.

So, it’s overly long and overly didactic and some good performances can’t really save it.  Rockabye runs at Factory Theatre until February 11th.

Photo credits: Sam Moffatt