The Comeuppance review: Play about the miseries of millennials promises more than it delivers

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's production is rich in ideas and beautifully staged, but it’s still two hours of listening to middle-aged millennials feeling sorry for themselves

Tamara Lawrance and Anthony Welsh in ‘The Comeuppance’, Almeida Theatre (Marc Brenner)

This is America. You can tell by the American flag. You can also tell by the porch, the screen door, and the two hours of slightly annoying self-interested conversation five characters indulge in as they meet for pre-drinks before their 20th-anniversary high-school reunion. American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins triply wowed audiences over here between 2017 and 2019 with his brilliantly postmodern race satire An Octoroon, office comedy Gloria (a Pulitzer finalist) and reframing of the great American play, Appropriate. His latest is a kind of post-Covid stock take of middle-ageing millennials.

The porch is Ursula’s (a wonderfully quiet, introspective Tamara Lawrance). First to arrive there is Anthony Welsh’s Emilio, who hasn’t been back for 15 years, not with his successful career as an artist in Berlin. Then there’s Caitlin (brilliant Yolanda Kettle), and her high-school ex Paco (Ferdinand Kingsley), an Iraq war veteran who treated her badly, and his cousin Kristina – a standout Katie Leung – an anaesthesiologist with five kids who’s desperate to have a good time.

Jungle juice flows, pot blazes, and we watch the characters slip in and out of adulthood as they (mis)remember old bits they used to do at school and play out their old grievances while complaining about where their lives have taken them. It’s all fairly naturalistic, but every so often – click! – there’s a blue light, and Death possesses one of the characters, monologuing directly to the audience about mortality. And Death is here on business, we’re told, so the play becomes a kind of anti-whodunnit – more like a who’ll-cop-it.

Yolanda Kettle, Tamara Lawrance, Katie Leung and Anthony Welsh in ‘The Comeuppance’ (Marc Brenner)

When it’s backlit by Natasha Chivers’s evening-tinged lighting, it’s amazing to see a whole house plonked into the Almeida, like it’s landed out of The Wizard of Oz. Designer Arnulfo Maldonado has created full, lived-in rooms just visible through the windows, but we don’t see any of it properly. We stay on the porch, not quite being let in, while director Eric Ting – who helmed the original New York production with a different cast – deftly keeps the ensemble perched on the stoop, never with quite enough room to get comfortable.

The American flag is a nice touch: not a mark of patriotism as much as of defeatism, that Ursula and the other characters are a product of American history and society – Columbine, 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, recession, Trump, Covid, everything else – whether they want to be or not.

And yet what’s most surprising about the play is that despite the uniqueness of the events the characters have lived through, we don’t really hear anything new. Their problems are the same ones everyone’s always had. It’s like Jacobs-Jenkins started out thinking he’d find lots to say about the unique miseries of millennials, and everyone ends up even more miserable by discovering that those miseries aren’t unique at all.

Welsh plays successful artist Emilio who hasn’t returned home in 15 years (Marc Brenner)

What’s more, watch it from this side of the Atlantic and its resonance is a bit quieter. This gang of people approaching 40 may be miserable, but they’re miserable with houses and decent jobs.

It’s a post-Covid play haunted by death, rich in ideas, beautifully staged, expertly performed. But it promises more than it delivers. Sometimes it’s profound. Sometimes it’s saying important things about the world we live in, how we’re a product of our age, how we’re all going to die etc. But it’s still two hours of listening to middle-aged millennials feeling sorry for themselves. Take it from a near-middle-aged millennial fond of feeling sorry for myself: a little goes a long way.

Almeida Theatre, until 18 May