Simon Stephens's Port at the National Theatre teeters on the edge of cliché, says Dominic Cavendish.

Port, National Theatre, review

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Kate O'Flynn as Racheal, Mike Noble as Billy in Port at the National Theatre Photo: Alastair Muir

By Dominic Cavendish

5:49PM GMT 29 Jan 2013

George Orwell talked about the “good bad book” – the book that endures, despite being badly written – and in Port, revived now at the National 10 years after it premiered at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, I think Simon Stephens has produced a “good bad play”.

Taking us through the dysfunctional, sometimes desperate life of Racheal Keats from 11 to 24, the play’s failings are glaring. Even the author, in a foreword to the reprinted text, looks back with a critical eye. Writing about his home town, Stockport, Stephens strives for a pointed realism that can be so studied it tips into heavy-going soap-operatics. In its depiction early on of unruly children and mildly delinquent teenagers, the evening teeters on the edge of cliché. And the flash of redemption – the belated realisation that there’s a world elsewhere – with which the whole thing is wrapped up feels too pat to make your spirit soar.

And yet. Stephens observes that “it’s a play carved out of an attempt to see something or make sense of something” – and taken on those terms, as a groping after something nearly impossible to catch, it commands attention, and even a grudging respect. I’m not sure the Lyttelton stage is the best home for it. What must have seemed quite intimate and fleet-of-foot at the Royal Exchange has acquired monumental scenic dimensions here: sundry locations – a bus-station, a hospital, a hotel – grind imposingly into view like cargo deposited in an industrial warehouse (courtesy of the designer Lizzie Clachan), forcing the players to enlarge their physicality to fill the spaces.

That said, I’d happily walk to Stockport and back if that was the only means of catching Kate O’Flynn’s mesmerising central performance as Racheal. She graces even the most prosaic, job-lot batches of dialogue with a quicksilver alertness to complex emotions. At first she’s a gawky, chatty child – stuck in a beaten-up Vauxhall with her mother and unlovely younger brother, in flight from the abusive father who’s going ape in their tower-block home.

Then she’s coping with her mother’s abandonment, mourning her grandfather, hitched to an abusive husband (Jack Deam, doubling as her hard-man father), and futilely hankering after the boyfriend she really wanted all along. O’Flynn’s smiles are like sunbeams cutting through dark clouds, but she tempers her winning sweetness with an air of seething anxiety and even explosive unpleasantness. You witness the growing pains of a woman who learns to cope with who she is and where she has come from – and that in itself is moving.

Although Marianne Elliott, who directed the original production, doesn’t elicit the same quality of truthfulness from all the other performances, she displays a painstaking touch that answers the play’s honourable intentions. Whether that’s enough for some people is another matter.

Until Mar 24. Tickets: 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk

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