Breaching into adulthood and its implications for parents and their offspring is a phenomenon of timeless universality. Swoop Production’s Window Seat beautifully captures one such tale—a mother and daughter, European holiday bound. Masterfully written by Oxford student Cleopatra Coleman the play quietly submerges the audience into an all too familiar universe.
As the neurotic, bohemian mother and her caustic, lesbian daughter converse, the viewer is dragged through the nostalgic past of their own parents’ foray into early adulthood. Age-ripened regrets set against youthful aspirations, and the re-evaluation of the steadfast moral axioms which cushion our childhoods.
Despite what this introduction may lead you to believe, Window Seat makes for easy viewing. Happily reflective, forgiving, and funny, Coleman cleverly constructs a realm that relates the absurd beauty and dysfunction of the 21st century British family. Throughout the play, as often in life itself, it is the lucid-brained daughter whose judgements we trust above the mother’s. This, paired with frequent maternal didacticisms (“shag a lot, Lois”) provides a humorous tension.
However simple the mise-en-scène (just an aeroplane seat row will do), the economical script and skillful acting fabricate a capacious sense of place, memory, and character. The world created is an easily recognisable one. There is little else to demand from art than a pleasing and somewhat sad pertinence to our present lives. It is a light-hearted elegy of life in the West, post-God and post-war, within which we navigate the familiar little frictions which tug against our paths to happiness.
One would think the overhead thumping of the ‘YMCA’ from a venue above to be obstructive to the immersivity of the play. It is testament to its absorbing simplicity that this wasn’t the case. Support this little production before its run finishes on the 24 th!
Window seat is on Aug 16-17, 19-24,
Buy tickets here.
Image by Jess Shurte provided by Window Seat .