Charles Hutchinson reviews Up The Duff, York Theatre Royal (From York Press)

Charles Hutchinson reviews Up The Duff, York Theatre Royal

9:31am Saturday 14th November 2009

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IT is said that the majority of theatre ticket-buyers are women, often in their fifties. Up The Duff is a play for them and the girls’ night-out crowd who gang up for The Vagina Monologues, Kay Mellor, Jane Thornton, Amanda Whittington, Stepping Out and that pole-dancing play with Lisa Riley and Abi Titmuss.

It is also said that the majority of theatre critics are men, often in their tired fifties or upwards. Lisa Evans’s world premiere is not a comedy for them.

Up The Duff is a terrible title, out of date and a turn-off, which may have contributed to the poor attendance on Thursday night – although usually it takes word of mouth to kick-start a new show, and come Friday morning, two people rushed up to say how hilarious they had found the sight of a woman with a knitted uterus on her head…and how they had laughed and laughed at a desperate woman relieving herself in a bucket, water sound effects and all, for seemingly an eternity.

If you don’t find that funny – and I found it as forced as the peeing motion – then stay away from Evans’s slight, condescending tale of four pregnant women, one menopausal midwife (Sarah Parks) troubled by a harrowing hospital inquiry, and her hapless husband (Colin Tarrant), a DIY enthusiast even more incompetent than Frank Spencer. Each entry has him re-emerging with a worse injury as Evans hammers home the jokes: the laboured, telegraphed stuff of an ITV sitcom.

The pregnant quartet at the ante-natal class in an over-stretched NHS hospital with a leaking roof covers all the bases. Irish businesswoman Roshin (Shelley Atkinson) has undergone IVF at 40 and is rapidly losing confidence as her world changes; brassy, blunt hairdresser Teresa (Kali Peacock) has a play-away husband and a self-destructive attitude problem that fails to mask her loneliness.

Newly returned to her home town, Kizzy (Pippa Duffy) is a mystery to all but Teresa, who knows all about her troubled past. Jess (Lucy Beaumont) is a gobby teenager stacked up like her hair with all the blonde clichés in a cast full of stereotypes.

Evans spoons in all manner of issues, not only the menopause and the state of the NHS but also pre-eclampsia and post-natal depression, yet accumulatively it feels contrived and the dialogue is often dull, flat and anticlimactic, for all the cast’s tireless graft. Evans may tick all the right boxes for the classic mix of laughter and tears but what’s missing is surprise, a key tool in all comedy.

Tellingly, director Damian Cruden has added familiar baby-themed songs to a play he picked up after it was commissioned but never performed by the Stephen Joseph Theatre. These are performed in full in a nightclub style beneath mirror balls but they nevertheless look tagged on to provide much-needed contrast.

Up The Duff is that rarity, a duff Damian Cruden show: lots of bumps but too much of a grind.

Up The Duff, York Theatre Royal, until November 28.

Box office: 01904 623568.

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