Kerry Jackson - Dorfman, National Theatre

Save yourselves and avoid avoid avoid. One of the worst nights at the theatre I have ever had. Appreciate it was the first show (with first preview cancelled) but the script was rancid, including lots of offensive jokes. Don't mind a joke slightly close to the wire, but MUST be funny! Flabberghasted that this got through the lit dept. Some of the acting was shockingly bad.
To add insult to injury we sat in the balcony and could see maybe 40% of the stage, and almost all the scenes are acted in the 60% we couldn't see...
Like seeing an offensive audio play.
Gosh.

Sounds like the set design was okayed by the same person as Middle, with a lot of the stage out of view to much of the audience. I've booked front facing seats for this, so hoping it won't be that bad by January...

Saw this tonight from Row B of the Stalls, and was able to see the play, as well as hear it, which was nice. It feels like a sitcom pilot, with a working class right winger as the protagonist, flirting with romance with a middle class left winger. It delivers a medium amount of laughs (nowhere near as funny as Vardy Vs Rooney, for example), and a medium amount of romance (not as romantic as "Beginning," for example), but April de Angelis is an intelligent enough writer that all the characters have nuances, even when they are offensive, and this is a likeable if averagely entertaining evening.

Some spoilers follow. . .

As with De Angelis's "Jumpy" (I'll never forget Doon Mackichan's dance lol), exuberant and awkward displays of singing and dancing leaven the atmosphere considerably. An inappropriate and awkward medley of songs performed by Fay Ripley's title character, including Cher's "If I could turn back time" and Cyndi Lauper's "Girls just want to have fun," is a major highlight.

Ripley is playing a Thatcherite, Leave voting, homeless detesting, right winger that most National patrons are unlikely to identify with, but De Angelis is too smart to allow Kerry Jackson to be Alf Garnett, and there are redeeming qualities to her, not least her willingness to rethink her positions as well as her life affirming party girl bravado.

Similarly, her unlikely potential romantic match, middle class Stephen, played with winning awkwardness and standoffishness by Michael Gould, is also not allowed to get away with his right on wholesomeness, given that he's all too happy to judge Kerry harshly for her treatment of a homeless man, but you just know he'll never offer that man a room in his home.

Supporting characters are grist to the mill for the left - right, lower - middle class sitcom antagonistic set-up, with Madeline Opiah in empathetic form as an immigrant of unsettled status who Kerry hypocritically employs, Michael Fox injecting a dose of unpredictable gritty sadness as an intelligent young homeless man plagued by history and addiction, Kitty Hawthorne as Alice who exposes her father's inconsistencies by being even more right-on than he is, and Gavin Spokes as the fizzingly offensive, sexist and exuberant lower class right winger, who is a potential rival for Kerry's affections.

Evidently, De Angelis would like to bridge the gap that divides people on political lines, and her attempt feels both contrived and intelligent, but ultimately, the test of a comedy is how many laughs it generates, and this one isn't funny enough to be top notch. It feels like the mediocre but acceptable pilot that awaits the funnier episodes in the future.

3 stars from me.

I'm encouraged and relieved by the more positive recent comments as this was the only current/new NT production of interest to me but due to the unpublished running time when booking opened, I wanted a matinee ticket and couldn't find one at a price I was prepared to pay; also, a huge number of the matinee performances listed aren't bookable -though not showing as sold out either - which is very frustrating when you have to accommodate existing bookings and avoid train strike days.

So, having spent an inordinate amount of time waiting for Friday Rush booking to open and then in the queue, I was at last able to book a cheap ticket but all that was left by the time my turn came was an RV ticket in row L of the stalls. Question, please, for those who have seen this and especially given the above comments about poor views: is anyone able to advise me whether I'm likely to be able to see much from this seat or would I do better to wait until later in the run and try for a return or another Friday Rush ticket? Normally I can't do Friday Rush as it's one of my volunteering days but I had taken last Friday off and had to sit in my hotel room for a good hour to ensure I had a good signal, so quite a palaver.

I saw this last night and found it fairly average. Great performances (though I struggled to hear some of what Fay Ripley was saying - either she needs to work on her projection or they need to mic her up) and some very funny lines in the script, but overall not enough of a story for me to get into it. The characters are mostly all unlikeable for various reasons and I'm not really sure what we were supposed to realise by the end - that everyone's a bad and judgmental person in their own way?

First act stronger than the second, by which time I'd realised it wasn't going anywhere. Most of the best lines in the first half, too. Enjoyed the set and the various nods to the local area (where I live).

Could be a lot shorter.

2.5/5

Thank you both, Steve and mkb for the helpful seating info. Mine is actually one of the side stalls seats, so the view may be worse than you suggest, but of course if you have a long wait in the Friday Rush queue, you have no way of knowing whether you missed out on better seats - or indeed, until your turn comes, whether there are any left at all for your chosen production/date combo.

It's frustrating both that the NT website no longer allows you to filter your search to select matinees - yet umpteen other permutations are allowed -nor explains why so many of the Kerry Jackson matinees apparently have availability, yet the system won't allow you even to view the seating plan, let alone book and with no reason given. I can't be the only person who needs a matinee for whatever reason.

Latecomer, I've now emailed the NT box office to ask about the lack of filter. Thought I should do something constructive (I hope) about it rather than merely whingeing here.

Just back from this - enjoyed it a lot. During the interval I heard a rather pompous guy damning it with faint praise by going on about how it was “a light play,” but I liked the way it used its sitcom-y structure as a sort of Trojan Horse to venture into some pretty deep, dark and chewy places.

Things were set up in a way that you thought you knew where you were going, but then you had the rug pulled from under you.

I liked the way that with some of the material it felt like De Angelis was challenging the audience: you can laugh, or you can pull a sucking-a-lemon face. For my part I laughed a lot, and it got a good reception at the end.

The NT seems to be releasing £25 front row seats for this a few days ahead of the performance. I picked mine up a couple or three days ago. The stage is high because of the revolve, but there’s a huge gap between the first row and the stage, so it didn’t seem too bad at all…

1 star in The Times

2 stars in Time Out - does make this play sound dreadful.
www.timeout.com/london/theatre/kerry-jackson-review

3.5 from the Public Reviews - inching its way up still!

Oh dear, sounds like Manor all over again. It might be nice to have a poll on this thread BurlyBeaR to see what non-critics think?

The Grauniad review is spot on. Funny that they and the ideologically opposed Times think the same. The Telegraph has weighed in with a whopping two stars. Now all we need is the FT.

4 stars by the way from WOS - a critic there I've never heard of (Gareth Carr).

Certainly sounds a very Marmite play. I'll make up my own mind when I see (whatever I do see) from my RV Friday Rush seat this Saturday. It sounds as though, should I be in the "enjoyed it" group, that will mark me out as a lowbrow, but better that than being disappointed and having wasted my time and money. And all the more so as there are now very few days left when trains/tubes aren't impacted by strikes.