★★★☆☆

A Flat Full of Chandeliers  is a new play by Sophia Beckingham that takes place over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, foretelling Christmas in a council flat very firmly set in 2015, with references to the recent general election and zeitgeist technology.* It bills itself as ‘acerbic’, and that’s an accurate description – there is only one likeable character amongst the four: the youngest son Jack (Mitchell Fisher), and bearing in mind that he was the most common source of comedy in the show, it would be easy to have a skewed opinion of him.

In fact at first glance, all the characters are clichés: the uncaring alcoholic father (Mike Duran), the distraught mother (Katherine Jee), the child who has left for a better life (Phoebe Batteson-Brown) and the child who has stayed with the parent’s way of life (Fisher) are all characters we know well. However, a disturbingly matter-of-fact and natural script found more of a complication than that.

At its best, Chandeliers was upsettingly accurate in its depiction of what a family Christmas can be, complete with uncomfortable generation gaps at every turn, and showing that everyone is to blame, no matter how much they deny it. Just as the plot began to slip into melodrama, everyone decided that it’s easier to get along. Christmas was not saved, but it stoically continued.

Michelle Shortland’s direction was full of erratic movement, which could be showing the restlessness of the characters, or the restlessness of the artists. Either way, it felt somewhat at odds with the naturalism presented in the rest of the aesthetic. The pacing diatribes gave way to moments of still tableau that tied the whole together, and some of the best moments of comedy were physical, with a stand out moment involving a flying Trivial Pursuit board.

After something of a shaky start in the face of an unforgiving auditorium, the actors left everything on the stage, and by the end the audience were drawn into what became slick naturalistic dialogue – difficult to follow the words, easy to tell what was being said.

This show was full of promise from both Beckingham and Twisted Dame. It would have been nice to see the fallout on Boxing Day for a proper ending, but fringe constrictions cap the show at an hour; an hour that is stressful and tense in all the right ways.

A Flat Full of Chandeliers is at the Hen & Chickens Theatre, Highbury until the 19th December 2015

*Quite literally – the number two trending topic for 2014 was “iPhone 6”.