Phone – Courtyard Theatre, London

Writer and Director: Sam Taylor

Sam Taylor’s delightful ensemble comedy-drama Phone takes an extended excursion around Gen Z preoccupations and explores how smartphones can interfere with human connections rather than facilitate them. The characters are fresh and finely drawn, and the writing is witty, sharp, and frugal. If only the direction were a bit zippier.

A middle-aged single dad, brusquely described by one of his kids as “middle management getting by on one whiskey at a time”, has gone to bed. His four Gen Z children are alone in a hotel room in Hastings, the location of many happy childhood holidays, wondering ominously why Dad has invited them there. “What history can Hastings have?” one of them asks, which suggests the first generation to have been entirely raised with ubiquitous internet, smartphones, and social media may need a history lesson or two. Physically, the siblings are together, but emotionally and psychologically, they are a million miles apart, living separate lives conducted mostly through phones or laptops. Why focus on the real world when the world inside your phone feels more real is the question that each, in different ways, is grappling with.

Harvey (Ted Walliker) is 22, addicted to Young Adult fiction, and thinks phones “are part of evolution”. He insists on ordering room service through a dysfunctional app, though he knows it would be easier to order from reception by phone. Issy (a delightfully sparky Jessica Garton) is 17 and possibly has an eating disorder and keeps going to the bathroom (“I like showers, don’t shame me,” she says to a sibling). Her expertise in the etiquette of text messaging offers a stand-out comic moment in the show.

Luke (Felix Warren) is a monosyllabic 15, suspended from school, and best friends with a fellow online gamer in Beijing whom he has never met. Overseeing the quartet in a materfamilias role is elder sister Helen (Flora Ashton), a care worker who spends much of her time asking why “people don’t go out anymore” and demanding her taciturn siblings “talk to me”. Into the mix, add Harvey’s journalist girlfriend Sara (Lauren Koster) and lonely hotel receptionist Reece (Matt Wake).

A complication arises when Dad invites his offspring to meet for breakfast in the morning. The location is Lenny’s Diner. The restaurant is infamous among the kids as the place where Dad has a habit of passing on bad news, or “ice cream shotguns”, as the family jargon has it. Infidelity, divorce, death, it all comes out at Lenny’s. Could the news be a marriage with Dad’s new girlfriend Darlene? The oldies like to “sit and eat biscuits”, says Luke, as if it is the oddest behaviour imaginable. Ironically, when the unwelcome news comes this time, Dad delivers it online. “He told us about it by text,” moans Izzy. “How else was he going to reach you?” says Helen.

Taylor gets the sibling’s interactions (or lack thereof) spot on. They communicate in the kind of curtailed, coded language that reveals a shared past. There is closeness and rivalry here, but remoteness and love too. The family milieu perfectly suits Taylor’s deftly economical style of writing, where an awful lot about the characters is hinted at rather than spelt out. Each is vulnerable in the way Gen Zers, brought up in an era of social media and constant connectivity, often are. But they are tough and resilient, too: Taylor has demonstrable compassion and empathy for his creations.

Walliker is tremendous as the cynical man-child Harvey, who struggles to disconnect from work or find intimacy with his girlfriend Sara, who represents the ‘real world’ that exists outside the twin realms of family and technology. Ashton’s weary Helen comes close to collapsing under the weight of unwanted responsibility for her siblings – their absent Mum’s input into the family consists of occasionally ‘liking’ a post on their Instagram feeds. Warren’s Luke captures teen angst and confusion perfectly.

If there is an odd note here, it is the direction. Long silences, in which the siblings mostly look at their phones, interrupt the momentum and leave the audience without much to do. It is as if key events unfold offstage, leaving us to wonder at their import. Taylor’s point seems to be that smartphones breed a kind of learnt muteness among their users: that this family has forgotten how to talk to each other. Fair enough, but slicing 20 minutes off the show’s runtime would communicate the same message.

Reviewed on 8 November 2024