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My Girl 2

  • Theatre, Drama
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
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Time Out says

3 out of 5 stars

It might sound like a sequel, but this is more a ‘re-imagining’. Writer Barrie Keeffe has taken his furious 1989 anti-Tory state-of-the-nation play ‘My Girl’ and updated it to reflect an equally grim British socio-political landscape under coalition control in 2014.

Financially trapped in a grotty flat in a hopeless part of east London, social worker Sam and his wife Anita – heavily pregnant with their second child – are drowning in debt and struggling to keep their relationship alive in Keeffe’s revised play.

The anger here is sharp and hot as Keeffe lays into everything from the parasitical culture of payday loans and the demonisation of social workers to the smug sneer of a silver-spoon government that spouts ‘Big Society’ while letting its members languish in despair.

It’s impossible to argue with any of this. But ‘My Girl 2’ occasionally buckles under the weight of its own importance. It’s often too on the nose, with credible characterisation sidelined for long speeches attacking everything that’s wrong today. Alexander Neal’s Sam, in particular, never quite feels real.

It’s a drawback for a play whose effectiveness depends on giving us believable people as well as realistic problems. It’s not helped here by Paul Tomlinson’s workmanlike direction and the pristine unreality of the shiny white flat set.

Thankfully, Emily Plumtree’s performance as Anita ensures the production stays vividly three dimensional. She finds the humour, heart and tragedy in the writing – utterly convincing as a woman trying to smile through her terror of potentially losing everything.

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