Genesis at Soho Theatre, W1

reviewed for The Times, 18 November 2016

Modern bedside manner makes for a cold performance. Go for a consultation on your risk level for breast cancer and you’ll probably meet someone like Helen Bradbury’s Rachel: restrained, informative, professional. Stage a medical “issue play” and you get the same thing: heavy on information, light on honesty. In Frazer Flintham’s new play we observe several consultations in which doctors aren’t at liberty to give emotional advice. The drama of their conflicts of interest drowns beneath a clinical aesthetic.

Rachel is a high-achieving geneticist, driven and single-minded. She has spent her life researching BRCA genes, which carry predisposition for breast cancer, when — shocker — she discovers her family may carry the gene. (Apologies for spoilers, but I can be surprising no one.)

Will Rachel take the test? What does it mean for her? Most importantly, what does it mean for her 18-year-old daughter, Jade, whom Rachel is pushing relentlessly towards Oxford University?

There’s a deep sympathy for the complex choices facing BRCA carriers, no doubt fuelled by the director Charlotte Bennett’s collaboration with the actress Morag Siller, who died of breast cancer earlier this year. The decision to undergo screening can present — along with increased insurance premiums — a new series of choices: mastectomy? Removal of ovaries? Accelerated family planning? We explore each ramification in depth.

Yet Bradbury struggles to throw off her clinical persona, even in domestic dramas with Joanna Nicks’s endearing Jade. Perhaps that’s who Rachel is. Perhaps Flintham hasn’t given her the material to do more. (He does provide an awful lot of bad puns based on Jade’s Ancient Greek A-level homework.) It doesn’t help that Bennett has Bradbury writhing in silent anguish between climactic scenes. A bit of twitching won’t make up for what’s lacking the script.

There is beauty in the opening sequence, in which the voices of children share their dreams for the future. Charlotte Melia provides solid support as Rachel’s colleague Jenny, and Nicks, a recent Lamda graduate, looks particularly promising. Elsewhere, however, Lydia Denno’s set is gimmicky, another attempt to fill the void in the script.