Theatre review: All of Us

All of Us opens with a neat little reverse: Two women sit opposite each other, Jess (Francesca Martinez) needing some help to get to her chair because she has Cerebral Palsy, Rita (Lucy Briers) apologising for being late and taking out a pad to take notes on the session. But Jess isn't the patient, she's the therapist, who's making slow but steady progress with Rita's OCD. Martinez is probably most recognisable as a comedian but here doubles as writer and star of a tragicomic play tearing into the last 12 years of austerity cuts to vital benefits, particularly to people with disabilities. Jess is busy, productive and independent in everything except her own body, whose "wobbly" nature means she needs help from flatmate Lottie (Crystal Condie) and care assistant Nadia (Wanda Opalinska) to dress herself and cook.

When the government introduces constant re-evaluation of disabilities, even for lifelong conditions, she has her mobility car taken away from her, meaning she can no longer drive to her office, and has to stop working.

Jess is averse to making a fuss, but her new friend Poppy (Francesca Mills) is much more outspoken - a lively 21-year-old who isn't going to let needing a wheelchair stop her from having an adventurous sex life, she too has the life she's built for herself thrown into disarray by callous government cuts to her care services. They both try to appeal the decisions but Poppy starts to get frustrated at Jess' apparent inability to get angry, either on her own behalf or anyone else's, and attempts to fix everyone else's problems without seeking help herself. They find themselves in a wider group of neglected people with disabilities when they attend a meeting with local MP, and DWP minister, Hargreaves (Michael Gould.)

All of Us starts out strong but frustratingly goes off the rails halfway through: The first act is a great balance of the heartbreaking with the sharply funny, with Poppy describing Nadia introducing her to Jess as "a crip playdate," and Jess explaining a bloodstain on the carpet as "Iain Duncan Smith came round, I murdered him." A genuinely sexy scene between Poppy and a Tinder hookup (Oliver Alvin-Wilson) contrasts with what she's reduced to once her nighttime care is removed, and she has to be in bed from 9pm to 7:30am every night, in nappies because there's nobody to help her to the toilet. We also start to see part of Martinez' theme about society's pain being interlinked, through Hargreaves' connection to one of Jess' patients, Aidan (Bryan Dick.)

But after the interval the play succumbs to a common problem of political theatre, in that it tries to encompass too much about the subject, and ends up simply recreating arguments around the subject rather than dramatising them. The town hall meeting with Hargreaves (for which the house lights stay on and the ensemble are scattered throughout the audience to interject) soon starts to feel more like the real thing than a piece of theatre, with Gould's slippery politician all-too-frustratingly convincing with his falling back on meaningless slogans and empty promises.

Even when the play returns to its central characters and their story, it keeps getting sidetracked. It's partly based on real life testimonies, and I can understand the desire to honour those people by including their own harrowing stories, but it feels like the play runs at three hours because that's as much as they could get away with, not because that's how long was genuinely needed to make its point. Ian Rickson's production has a simplicity and straightforwardness mirrored by Georgia Lowe's unfussy design that centres on a slow-moving revolve. The script though feels less like a carefully developed National Theatre play, and more like one of those Royal Court shows where any idea that shows up in any of the drafts will end up on stage in some form.

Both Poppy's transformation into a right-wing mouthpiece, and Jess and Aidan's relationship turning romantic, are too abrupt (although I can understand the temptation, if writing a role for yourself to play, of just including the stage direction "then she gets off with Bryan Dick.") But on the other hand the production is full of strong performances, with a predictably bright and lively turn from Mills, a thoughtful and complex character from Dick, and Condie and Opalinska providing the kind of friends you'd want to have your back. Martinez has given herself perhaps a harder job than she realised with the saintly Jess, but she manages to keep her likeable. All of Us tells true and heartbreaking stories, but it's a shame Martinez didn't trust the audience to extrapolate the central characters' predicament for ourselves, rather than spelling out how widespread the problem is.

All of Us by Francesca Martinez is booking until the 24th of September at the National Theatre's Dorfman.

Running time: 2 hours 55 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.