REVIEW: TOO MANY BOOKS at Upstairs at The Gatehouse 26 February – 16 March 2025

Photography: Alex Brenner

‘Bevan’s script sizzles with quips’ ★★★★

We meet Daniel and Julia as they test each other on their Mandarin, surrounded by saturated bookshelves in the comfort of their middle-class home. 50 and 42 respectively, the couple are a little old to be thinking about children, but both on their second marriage and two miscarriages into IVF treatment, have decided to adopt. It’s the 90s, and, as older parents that want a child under the age of two, they have to go overseas to find a baby. The Chinese government are more than willing, as their one-child policy has left thousands of babies in orphanages. However, Daniel and Julia, who have been to multiple seminars on parenting and think they can cope, must pass a rigorous home study. Enter Zaydee, a feisty, no-nonsense social worker whose prejudice for the middle class irritates her boss, Cynthia, who argues that she “cannot rule them out just because they listen to Radio 4 and know what an avocado is.” 

Judi Bevan’s debut play creates a dialectic around the right to have a family, loosely based on her own experience of adoption in the 1990s. Her script sizzles with quips on white saviourism, classism, and the idea that having “too many books” is a sign of naivety towards real-world issues. This intrigued me especially as at the back of the programme there is an advert for a company that provide books as interior decoration – a bit like when crash insurance is advertised on the most-crashed-into corner of a racetrack. Bevan presents arguments on both sides in ‘Too Many Books,’ showing on the one hand why scrutiny is important, as couples motivated to adopt because they want to rescue or replace a child are not adopting for the right reasons. Alexandra O’Neil gives an astute performance as Zaydee, whose hard-headed, pragmatic attitude around the couple breaks down in front of Cynthia, who has forgiven her for past malpractice because she was “the best of a bad lot.” Conversely, Bevan argues through Daniel – played warmly by John Sackville – that it is innately human to want a family, and everyone should have the right to try for one. The couple become more exasperated as Zaydee builds a case against them, but the war between the adoption agency, ‘Forever Families,’ and the literature-loving, out-of-touch couple is brought, unsurprisingly, to an end when they hire a lawyer who is “very experienced, very expensive, and very smug.” 

‘Too Many Books’ is undoubtedly a political piece of theatre, attempting to highlight the care crisis in the 90s and beyond. It questions how a child can be better off abandoned in an orphanage than with well-meaning, loving parents of a different ethnicity. While it rehashes this point perhaps too many times in the play’s repetitive second half, the main issue with Bevan’s script is that the characters don’t change. When reassigned a new social worker, who was conveniently adopted by parents of a different race herself, Daniel and Julia are much the same as they were towards Zaydee, offering tea and homemade biscuits and defending their exhaustive collection of books. But perhaps this is exactly what Bevan is trying to say about the middle class: with money comes power. So Daniel and Julia can have whatever they want. 

I have a lot more to say about this production but am running out of space – a fine sign that it will leave you with plenty to talk about on the way home.

Read Judi Bevan’s article, ‘Back to the Theatre’ here.

TOO MANY BOOKS by Judi Bevan 

Upstairs at The Gatehouse

26th February – 16th March 2025

Box office: https://upstairsatthegatehouse.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173660360/events/428697262 

Written by Judi Bevan

Directed by Christopher Hunter

Produced by John Jay and Graham & Townley Productions

Cast

Cynthia – Sue Kelvin

Zaydee – Alexandra O’Neil 

Julia – Lucy Pickles

Daniel – John Sackville

Chloe – Carol Walton