Theatre: Family fortunes

Shellfish and A Difficult Age

English Touring Theatre

Not Upstairs, Downstairs nor in anybody's studio but in main houses is where English Touring Theatre believes new work should be seen. They take off now after excellent box-office at their base in Crewe's fine Lyceum Theatre with two premiere productions: Judith Johnson's Shellfish and Marty Cruickshank's A Difficult Age, which, last Thursday, drew more to an after-show discussion than the capacity of some renowned small spaces.

Sixteen or so is usually reckoned "a difficult age", and its likely mix of headlong emotionalism and exasperating brattishness is certainly difficult to play. One feature of Stephen Unwin's strongly acted production is debutante Katie Blake's effortlessly natural and convincing performance as Osun. But one point of Marty Cruickshank's piece is that every age is difficult, especially middle age as the consequences of old decisions come home, or in this case to the maison secondaire.

The family house in southern France is the emblem of continuity through three generations. Osun's mother Catherine (Gabrielle Lloyd), nervy and earnest, long ago committed herself to the sacrifices of stability and sees herself as the fulcrum of this continuity. By contrast, her sister Rosemary (Lynn Farleigh) has returned, raddled and exhausted from roving the third world "leaving good intentions rotting in the sun". Twenty years ago, she also left a baby son, forbidding herself and her family even to mention him. Unknown to her, Catherine has invited the grown boy, Kristopher (Nick Fletcher), to the house.

From this incitement, the play eschews real plot development. We are invited to muse upon the value, or even the feasibility of Catherine's effort to combat the centrifugal forces acting upon the family, but Cruickshank will not decide for us. Well and good, but the play does drift uncertainly in mood, and the confrontation of Kristopher and his mother is hopelessly underdeveloped. Eventually it arrives at an over-deliberate wistful, evening tone, obviously modelled on Chekhov, but lacking the latter's preceding ruthlessness of action - one not really earned.

The world of Shellfish, directed by John Burgess, is more checkout than Chekhov. Pat (Chrissy Rock) works in a bread shop and fights off boredom by mixing the change in the till and marking men's bums out of 10. She's a card in the Margi Clarke scouse-mouth tradition, but age is an issue for her, too. At 49 she is fighting her way out of a violent marriage with the clog of a heroin-wasted son, Sam, played with sullen weight by Karl Draper.

At the gym she meets tongue-tied computer nerd Alex (Benedict Sandiford), and although, as Sam says, "we've got food in the freezer older than you", in no time they are married and in the fertility clinic. The short scenes have no space to develop this relationship to any credible degree and the backstory speeches "explaining" the characters are heavily contrived. The potential power of the subject is glimpsed in Pat's luminous soliloquy about the embryo clinging to life inside her, but otherwise this is a disappointing and unachieved piece.

Liverpool Everyman until 18 April;tour details 01270 501800

Jeffrey Wainwright