Apologia

Alexi Kaye Campbell's debut play 'The Pride' bagged him the Critics' Circle award for most promising newcomer last year. His second echoes its predecessor's reflection on the massive generational shift of the 1960s. 'Apologia' is entirely set in the kitchen of Kristin Miller (Paola Dionisotti), an old and eminent art historian. It's her birthday and her two sons are bringing some unanswerable questions to the table, along with their highly provoking partners. Why did Kristin fail to mention them in her recent autobiography or, indeed, to make them the priority of her actual life?
The often toxic compromise between parenthood and professional life is an irresistibly provoking issue: all too easy to empathise with and to pass judgment on. So it's both admirable and frustrating that Campbell's obliquely argued play refuses to deliver the dirty details on what exactly happened when Kristin lost custody of her sons all those years ago. Could she have fought for them? Did she want to? The panopticon viewpoint aims to take the audience through 360 degrees of shifting sympathy. That's not an easy position to settle into. And it's made more difficult by the fact that the play's argument - the personal rights and responsibilities of the consumer generation versus older big banner ideas like art and a better world - is a dialectic that the characters tend to shout about from opposite sides of the generation gap, rather than suffering inside themselves.