Isabelle review – a sprawling debut driven by big ideas and family conflict

Marc Graham’s debut stretches from festival short to full-length play, tackling inheritance, class and familial resentment with plenty of theatrical confidence

There are many reasons to admire Hull’s Middle Child, a small but determined company in Yorkshire’s East Riding.

It has a genuine interest in developing new writers, enormous ambition (the founders say they want it to be “the most influential new writing theatre outside London”) and it has become one of the first resident companies at the National Theatre under Indhu Rubasingham.

The significant thing about Middle Child’s commitment to new writing is that it allows inexperienced writers the confidence and resources to swing for the fences with big, bold work. Sometimes, they will connect, but not every attempt will succeed, and that’s fine.

Marc Graham’s debut is not a home run, but you have to admire the attempt.

Isabelle grew out of a 30-minute play at the company’s new writing festival in 2024 and has expanded into a piece running at a little more than 90 minutes which has been chosen to launch the company’s new permanent venue, a new theatre for Hull (and another reason for admiration).

Isabelle tells the story of the eponymous matriarch, a single mother to three variously damaged grown-up offspring.

We join them in a post-Christmas haze as Isabelle has gathered her three children, two daughters and a son, to make a significant announcement. What follows is a sub-Ayckbournian tale of family secrets being blurted out with single-note, heavy-handed confessional tones and a conversational manner that reaches for Wildean wit and falls short. All the characters are much too ready to reach for quotations, from Shakespeare to Marx, making Graham’s dialogue difficult to distinguish between the characters. There’s an absence of verisimilitude in the way this family communicates that makes it all but impossible to empathise with any of them; they appear to be more mouthpieces for the writer’s thoughts on the redistribution of wealth than lived-in characters.

The addition of a stranger with uncertain motives fares no better; he too speaks almost exclusively in soundbites – so much so that Graham crafts a game akin to Radio 4’s Just a Minute to justify putting the character on a literal soapbox.

It’s not that there is no potential here, but in truth Middle Child’s backing of a new writer is the thing that should be applauded.

• At 69 Humber Street, Hull, until 31 May