All angst but going nowhere

5@50, Royal Exchange, Manchester
BRAD Fraser, no longer enfant terrible of Canadian theatre — well, he is 52 — showed signs with his last Manchester play, True Love Lies, that his work was maturing.

Gone were some of the more outrageous sex scenes and nudity, in came yet more of his wonderful dialogue, sharp turns of plot and strongly-written characters.

With 5@50 he takes another step in that direction, but smart though the result is, there’s a nagging feeling he might now be losing what made his work so fresh and disgracefully vibrant.

Fraser moves out of his comfort zone — if he could ever be said to have had one — and writes about five friends, all around 50-years-old.

He hasn’t written an all-woman work before. Neither has he supported a play purely on character in this way: there has always been a bizarre device to drive things forwards.

These women have been friends for years but as they reach their landmark age, the cracks are definitely showing. Health, drink problems, infidelity, boredom — you name it, one of them has it — are taking their toll and straining friendships.

When birthday girl Olivia — Jan Ravens — is quite clearly drinking herself to more serious problems under the less-than-watchful eye of her female doctor lover Norma (Teresa Banham), the other three stage an intervention.

Fern (the stick-thin Barbara Barnes), Lorene (Candida Gubbins) and Tricia (Ingrid Lacey) cart Olivia off to a clinic, leaving Norma alone and vulnerable.

The play is essentially a drama, but as with all Fraser’s plays, comic one-liners or cutting remarks are never very far away. It’s about addictions and guilt: alcohol and adultery, abandonment of children and in Norma’s case, deliberately getting her lover back on drink because she’s needier that way, are just a few of the most prominent vices.

Fraser concentrates far more on character-driven plot than in any other of his works: indeed he admits that during the writing process he let his characters take over the action, rather than forcing them along preset paths.

This is fun, of a kind, but I hankered for Fraser plots of old; intricate, enlivened by snappy dialogue, outrageous and entertaining at the same time.

After the first hour of this quintet — generally fine though performances are — the whole thing becomes something of an angst festival that ultimately doesn’t really go anywhere.