M.A.D.
Bush Theatre, London

Dolan Cummings

David Eldridge's new play is like an intelligent version of I Love 1984. Behind the nostalgia for Subbuteo, Betamax videos and the days when Only Fools and Horses was a funny sitcom rather than a cringe-making Christmas institution is a sense that something more profound changed between 1984 when most of the play is set and 2003 when the final scene takes place.

The basic storyline, a working class family struggling to give their child a better life that will ultimately make him alien to them, is familiar. But the mood of the play is very different. For a start, John's parents are hardly angelic - they are brash, vulgar slobs, constantly fighting, and in the father's case, fundamentally ambivalent about the value of his son's education. The play's title links the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction with the parallel tension between Mum and Dad - the bomb in the latter case is separation, something that scares John more than the prospect of war.

The older John's exaggerated affection for his parents reflects his own sense of failure and emptiness. A first class degree and a highly paid job don't give him the sense of belonging he remembers from his childhood. Even his involvement in the 'Not in my Name' anti-war campaign seems meaningless. 'There's more meaning in my mum smoking than there is in a thousand banners,' he says rather obtusely, but we know what he means. They don't even do geopolitics like they used to... and what's with all these smoking bans?

Given the play's nostalgia, the staging is fittingly conservative - a meticulously reconstructed Romford living room. Indeed, on one level, M.A.D is a conventional sitting room drama, complete with dramatic catharsis and a moment of truth, but it is the atmosphere arising from the detail that sticks in the mind. One long scene in which the family watches TV in silence captures the easy affection amid the turmoil that makes the older John's yearning understandable.

The play has no answers, of course, but it does offer insight into the mindset of a generation ill-at-ease with itself and its place in history. The future may be another country, but we're not there yet.

Till 22 May 2004.