The 40-ish menopausal woman seems to be having a moment, from Bridget Christie’s sitcom The Change to Sally Wainwright’s latest BBC project Riot Women. Park Theatre’s Kindling, written by Sarah Rickman and directed by Emma Gersch, brings this subject to the stage. It’s refreshing to see a too often overlooked demographic getting some TLC, but unfortunately when it comes to the storytelling Kindling falls flat.
With strong echoes of The Breakfast Club, Rickman introduces us to an unlikely quintet of characters brought together by their recently deceased friend Mei. Her final request was that the five women go on a camping trip to disperse her ashes, ignoring (or perhaps delighting in) the personality clashes that would inevitably ensue. Cue lightning and thunder, a wrong turn, and a chaotic night stuck in the wilderness.
The five leads are quickly established as fitting into very broad stereotypes: the posh one, the practical one, the party girl, the yoga girl, and the scatterbrain. Though these façades are lightly prodded over the course of Kindling, none of the characters ever feels fully rounded; too often an opportunity to add real character depth is forsaken for a cheap joke that puts them right back in their box.
The real sin is that the protagonists are simply unlikeable in a way that makes them uninteresting to watch. The broadness of their personalities and the farcical humour, which misses more often than it hits, makes it hard to invest emotionally. The characters’ growth and obligatory bonding feels unearned. It doesn’t help that some of the key points of dramatic tension feel slightly derivative, especially in the second act when it all gets a bit soap-opera-esque (there are two husband-based revelations in quick succession and of course the classic line, “You don’t know me!”)
Even some of the well-intentioned attempts to tackle taboo topics and depict the realities of life for women of that age struggle to have an impact. The conversations about motherhood and perimenopause work too hard to convey information to the audience at the expense of realistic dialogue. Add in some cloying feminine clichés (getting drunk on white wine, and inexplicably, bringing a vibrator to a one-night camping expedition) and the whole thing just lacks a sense of sharpness.
There’s also an unfortunate series of odd staging and scene choices. Gersch has characters regularly wander off-stage as a scene break or to allow for one-on-one moments, which is confusing considering they’re all meant to be hopelessly lost in dense woodland. A few key plot points take place in the very front corner of the stage, which is easily missed from the other side of Park Theatre’s smaller auditorium.
Perhaps those in a similar life situation to the characters, or with similar experiences of loss and bonding, will find something that resonates here. But the complicated nature of female friendship is hard to capture at the best of times, and Kindling doesn’t quite pull it off.
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