Birthday

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4 stars The Independent by Paul Taylor, 29 June 2012

For the male members of the audience, Joe Penhall’s new play gives a whole new twist to the idea of a buttock-clenching experience.

Feminist author Gloria Steinem once wrote a piece called “If Men Could Menstruate”, arguing that a process that women are taught to feel ashamed about would automatically become “an enviable, worthy, masculine event” and the subject of competitive boasting:“‘Yeah, man, I’m on the rag’”. Penhall goes one better than this, positing a near-future world in which, courtesy of artificial wombs, men can choose to play mother and go through the multiple gruesome indignities of pregnancy and labour on their spouse’s behalf

There’s nothing like role-reversal drama for revealing the double standards and injustices that we accept as perfectly natural and the switch at the centre of this often hilarious and provocative play is wonderfully fertile, so to speak, in that regard. It’s a tribute to Penhall that you sit there wondering why no one has thought of putting it centre stage (as here in Roger Michell’s very funny and crisply focused production) before. Familiar as Guy Secretan, the bumptious anaesthetist in TV’s Green Wing, the excellent Stephen Mangan is droll casting as blokey Ed, on all fours in agony, bum in air for inspections (“I’ve been prodded more times than an unripe avocado”) and at the mercy of hormonal mood swings and all-female medical attention (and inattention).

Ed’s prickly executive wife (Lisa Dillon) was left unable to have any more children after a traumatic labour with their son. It’s a measure of the play’s even-handedness that she’s shown to be not above pulling rank in a slight dismissiveness of male pregnancy where there are no contractions and it’s a Caesarian delivery. Cue an hilarious sequence where Ed, narked by this, strains grotesquely in satirical mock-contraction mode “I’m locating my inner vagina”.

Male motherhood is still, we gather, a fairly new possibility and the NHS (at which Penhall takes several swipes) seems to be encouraging it on the half-baked grounds that deliveries are quicker and free up beds. It struck me that it might have been profitable to have set the play further down the line so that we could see whether the disproportionate power of a complaining male lobby is resulting in an invidious two-tier system. But Birthday is full of joys – including Llewella Gideon’s laid-back seen-it-all black midwife and Louise Brealey’s direct young registrar who cheerfully admits to pitying people with children. Go.

4 stars Whatsonstage by Michael Coveney, 29 June 2012

One good thing about being a man is that you don’t have to have a baby. But according to Joe Penhall, whose Birthday at the Royal Court is the latest in his searing, funny and alarming forays into bodily functions and the health service, it’s no consolation to watch how it’s done.

The humiliation of childbirth has driven Stephen Mangan’s curly-headed, highly strung Ed into the strange position of going through the procedure himself. Yes, he’s completely up the duff on an NHS maternity ward, already induced, detailed for a caesarean, and looking forward to the epidural they won’t give him.

His high-flying executive wife Lisa (Lisa Dillon) had a difficult birth with their first child after suffering a series of miscarriages. So Ed has bitten the bullet, though we are spared the anatomical and biological detail of how this happened: instead, he’s taken to the physical inconvenience as only a man could, as a flouncing drama queen relishing all the symptoms from tears to swollen ankles.

“I’m like a Bernard Matthews turkey”, yells Mangan, shifting uncomfortably around the bed while Llewella Gideon’s lumbering, disinterested midwife turns him on his tummy to execute an insertion with latex gloves in order to discover if the baby has moved from the bowel to the abdominal cavity…

The maternity hospital is situated next to a prison, making the point that new life is starting as a rebuttal of the old lags, though Mark Thompson’s sleek circular design has the green anodyne cleanliness of the new tower at University College Hospital.

Penhall’s slightly disgruntled view of the NHS is based on some unlucky personal experience, but he manages to turn the mishaps and screams of rage into scintillating comic dialogue, so that the comedy becomes one of the human condition, not just sour grapes. There’s a cord around the new baby’s neck that need emergency attention, and the whole business of its arrival is as fraught with difficulty as someone turning up at immigration without the right papers.

And the piece is beautifully and tactfully acted by the spirited Mangan and the slinky Dillon in Roger Michell’s finely judged production, which re-unites the writer and director of the movie version of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love as well as of Penhall’s own psychiatric, ground-breaking classic Blue/Orange; running at just 90 minutes it covers so much ground you hardly notice the pain.

Penhall is not just having a grumble but also querying what children do to relationships that were forged without them. These are deep waters, and the final moments of the play are curiously moving. And there’s a lovely little cameo from Louise Brealey as a registrar steering well clear of obstetrics, a man’s world, apparently, and full of politics. Suffer little children.

4 stars The Telegraph by Dominic Cavendish, 29 June 2012

“How could you forget my f—-ing raspberry leaf tea?” Stephen Mangan’s dishevelled Ed, both the father and mother-to-be of his second child, snaps near the start of Joe Penhall’s gruesomely entertaining new comedy which fruitfully wonders what would happen if men could take a starring role in the messy, fraught end-game of human reproduction.

It’s not a pretty sight. Holed up in a barren NHS room and with no sign of the anaesthetist, Ed – rubbing his huge tummy and shifting in discomfort – is taking the strain out on his nearest but not particularly dearest, Lisa. Played with a wonderful air of brittle composure by Lisa Dillon, the latter is doing her best to indulge her husband’s prima donna-ish outbursts. But having been there herself, and now wearing the trousers as the family’s breadwinner, her tolerance levels aren’t much higher than his pain threshold.

Penhall is onto an absolute winner here, taking an inspired idea and using its inversion of normal biological procedure to breed a fertile mix of existential questions and corporeal, sometimes gross-out humour. For all the hospital soaps on TV, there’s nothing out there that cuts with anything like this double-edged finesse to the heart of how we manage the whole birth business in this country and to the core of vexed issues about who does what in modern relationships.

A father himself, Penhall makes you think about the agonies a bloke might have to endure in going beyond the usual call of hormonal duty – sacrificing booze, curry and sex in the run-up while suffering all manner of humiliations come the big day. But the feminist flip side is to make you see what’s taken for granted. Lisa and the two female nursing staff (a hilariously blasé African midwife, played by Llewella Gideon, and Louise Brealey’s well-meaning young registrar) may patronise Ed. But they’re only giving him a taste of the standard sexist medicine.

It’s undoubtedly Mangan’s night in Roger Michell’s stark, stylish and briskly efficient production. A blissful comic actor, he hits every note of petulance, panic and self-pity dead on, sucking on the gas-and-air like a helpless child needing its dummy, but he also nurtures a body of deep emotion that swells to a pregnant pitch of anguish and recrimination as the evening rises to an exhausted peak. If you’ve been there, you’ll love this. If you’re pondering parenthood, my god will it give you pause.

4 stars Financial Times by Ian Shuttleworth, 1 July 2012

In a way it is unfortunate that just as Equity, the actors’ union, voices its protests that subsidised theatres offer too few roles for women, the Royal Court opens a four-hander in its main house that features only one man. And he’s pregnant.

Joe Penhall’s latest play begins with the appearance of a simple role-reversal, as high-strung Ed and too-ostentatiously solicitous Lisa await the midwife’s arrival in their hospital room, shortly after Ed’s labour has been induced. However, it soon becomes apparent that this is not the beginning and end of the matter, as with that 1970s family-planning poster of an abdominally bulging young chap. In this alternative present, men can be implanted to carry (ectopically) and bear (by C-section) children as an alternative to female pregnancy: as an affirmation of gay family lifestyle, for instance, or, as here, because Lisa can no longer do so following complications during a previous delivery.

Consequently, although Penhall – and director Roger Michell and his cast – have some fun with mixing and matching gender stereotypes, it is only one part of the picture. The same-only-different perspective refreshes what would otherwise be rather hackneyed personal stresses, as both Ed and Lisa consider the viability of their relationship. And although it may or may not have been Penhall’s primary intention, the here-and-gone midwife and the registrar who doesn’t appear until halfway through serve as an illustration at once novel and trenchant of the strain under which National Health Service resources and structures are being placed. We are clearly working on several levels here.

The part of Ed could have been written for Stephen Mangan. He always seems to embody the assorted unreasonablenesses of the modern bloke while still being somehow endearing. Lisa Dillon has a plateful of a role as Lisa, who has it all (family, career) except a core component (biology) and is deeply conflicted as to whether she wants any of it. Llewella Gideon and Louise Brealey as the medical staff are more simplistically written, presenting one facet (brusque midwife, overworked junior registrar) then softening for a payoff.

But, as with last year’s Haunted Child , Penhall allows us to put the pieces together as we please. Ninety minutes of entertainment or deceptive think-piece, it’s still a healthy, bouncing bundle.

The New York Times by Matt Wolf, 10 July 2012

One tends to speak admiringly of the well-made play — of shows possessed of a sense of purpose and of the structural finesse to bear those intentions out.

But there can be separate pleasures to be derived from dramas that don’t necessarily arrive in a neat parcel, their endings all but preordained. That’s just one reason to commend Joe Penhall’s startling “Birthday,” at the Royal Court Theatre until Aug. 11. This is Mr. Penhall’s second Court premiere in six months, after “Haunted Child,” and this latest entry begins as one thing and finishes as another. Which means that its numerous virtues include the ability to surprise.

To hear “Birthday” described is to feel as if you have been there, done that. A pregnant man undergoes the birthing process, thereby awakening into a realm of experience hitherto reserved for the female sex. Didn’t Billy Crystal take us to this very place a quarter century ago in the Joan Rivers movie “Rabbit Test,” followed in 1994 by Arnold Schwarzenegger undergoing a Caesarean section in the Ivan Reitman film “Junior?”

How fertile (forgive the adjective) can such a premise be, especially in the theater, where one can presumably see the prosthetics bulging large? In fact, the gender-defying conceit turns out to figure among the less remarkable aspects of a play that has more on its mind than the easy humor to be had from dressing the likes of Mr. Schwarzenegger in pink.

As acted by the wonderful Stephen Mangan, a popular television actor who should be encouraged at every turn to return to the stage, the pregnant Ed in Mr. Penhall’s play emerges as a capital-G guy whose machismo (“I’m the boss,” he shouts) is pushed to the limits and beyond by the unusual state in which he finds himself.

Mr. Penhall doesn’t waste too much time on how Ed ended up in the family way; nor do such scientific quandaries matter much to the arc of the short play (90 minutes, no intermission). More to the point is the extent to which his condition prompts a marital crisis and worse. You might even say that Ed’s waters break emotionally well before they do in birth-giving terms and that a scenario generally played for gags on screen tilts at times on stage toward the scabrous realm of, well, Strindberg.

The play doesn’t entirely exist within the realm of metaphor, tempting though it is to regard Mr. Mangan’s distended belly as an image of the baggage Ed will need to shed before restoring something resembling order — not to mention love — with his wife, Lisa (Lisa Dillon), whose bedside concern for her husband’s bodily well-being is amplified by her apprehension that the man she loves may be going mad. Weighing on her, as well, are the demands of a son, Charlie, already born and at home, who needs his parents, too.

Mr. Penhall, like Mr. Mangan, has two sons in real life, and the playwright does find room for the drolly sarcastic remarks one might expect: “Mum playing football with the kids while dad gestates,” Ed snarls early on. “My father hates the idea.”

But such raillery soon gives way to the growing schism between husband and wife, which in turn is set against the backdrop of the slippage of a British National Health Service where the obstetric care, on this evidence, is not up to scratch.

Ms. Dillon’s breathily spoken Lisa aside, the world at large is represented by Llewella Gideon in priceless form as a slow-moving midwife, Joyce, as cheerful as she is clueless — “Have you been induced?” is her apparent mantra — and an amusingly serene Louise Brealey as a young doctor who says “please” a lot when not trying to persuade Ed that his mounting agony, in fact, equates to his “lucky day.”

I suspect there’s a degree of score-settling involved in Mr. Penhall’s depiction of the medical establishment here, but it’s the terrain toward which the play then shifts that lifts the material beyond a prolonged sketch. Staged on a revolving set by Mark Thompson that comes to resemble a variant on the prison said to exist just next door (Hugh Vanstone’s expert lighting abets our sense of the hospital room as jail cell), “Birthday” has landed in the happy hands of the director Roger Michell, who is able to guide its shifting tone toward a triumphant and never-sentimental finish.

That conclusion owes much to the perpetually shaggy-haired Mr. Mangan (a 2009 Tony nominee for his gorgeous Broadway turn in “The Norman Conquests”), whose large eyes seem to spring themselves to a new awareness, faced with the emergence into the world of a child whose presence (and good health) silence Ed’s braying self-bravura, seemingly for good.

More squeamish members of the audience may be put off by the play’s emphasis along the way on the procedurals of pregnancy in much of its clinical, graphic completeness: epidurals, abdominal pains, rectal examinations and the like. But when Ed speaks softly to Lisa of the “music of life,” “Birthday” strikes a harmonious note that will make even those who don’t have children want to cheer.

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