Lungs

Alistair Cope and Kate O'Flynn in Lungs
Alistair Cope and Kate O'Flynn in Lungs

Despite their anonymous names – M (the man) and W (the woman) – the central characters of Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs are instantly recognisable. 30-something, well-educated Guardianistas – she’s trying to quit smoking and finish her PHD, he’s working in a record store because it’s only a matter of time before his band gets signed. They’re in Ikea, that secular cathedral, when M asks W one of the big questions, ‘Shall we have a baby?’ W nearly has a panic attack in the lamp section, they leave the labyrinthine aisles with nothing they came for and begin a game of relationship ping-pong in which W’s neurotic stream of consciousness is countered by M’s naïve optimism.

All the normal doubts and anxieties around producing a brand new human being get magnified in the couple’s feverish badinage from the microcosm of their relationship to the macrocosm of the future of planet earth. They’re ‘good’ people, they recycle, they buy fair trade, can they really justify bringing another pair of CO2 producing lungs into this already polluted world? But if the ‘good’ people with degrees and scruples and environmental guilt don’t reproduce then what hope is there for future generations? All very worthy concerns but it soon becomes clear that these eco-exchanges are a fig leaf for the fact that their doubts are more about each other than the planet. She can’t bear to conceive their child while he has his ‘porn face on’, he’s worried that she’s too highly-strung to conceive at all, and neither of them can really stand mixing their genetic make-up with that of their in-laws.

Macmillan’s watch-tight writing and Richard Wilson’s slick direction gives this production real pace, while the absence of scenery and props allows the spare stage to morph into a bedroom, a nightclub, a public toilet and a figurative debating chamber. Alistair Cope and Kate O’Flynn are equally adaptable, showing each of the couple warts and all – M full of childlike wonder one minute and a philanderer’s cowardice the next, W passive-aggressive and petulant in arguments and intensely vulnerable in despair. This is a clever play with such credible and well-acted characters that it never becomes preachy or sacrifices the drama to the issues. It’s a shame that it loses momentum in the last 20 minutes, stretching the unities of time too far to retain the immediacy of the first half. That said, it remains a meaty main course to the Roundabout Season and gives voice to just the kind of  contemporary dilemma new writing should be chewing over.

Lungs and the rest of the Roundabout Season runs in the Crucible Studio until 26 November. Book here.