The Babysitter[author-post-rating] (3/5 stars)

As a comedy of awkwardness and manners, The Babysitter shows huge promise: the young cast are confident and talented, the script punchy and quick, the setting well-established. Sara and Jay need to hire a babysitter for their young daughter, a sweet girl with a history of epilepsy, and Aaron is being given a try-out to see if he fits the bill. In their comfortable, middle-class living room, Sara and Jay are semi-recognisable types, with an armchair interest in politics and a terror of saying the wrong thing, hyper-aware of Aaron’s Jewish upbringing. So far, so fun – and then their teenage daughter Nikki comes downstairs.

It’s important to foreground at this point that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Katie Caddick’s performance; the entire cast do a great job, with some seriously impressive comic timing and nice chemistry, while writer/director Breman Rajkumar has an ear for dialogue that already demands respect, and could be amazing in a few years’ time. But Nikki is part of a wider cultural trend towards unbearable characterisations of teenage girls.

She is a hugely unsympathetic character, indignant, apoplectic at the prospect that her parents are going to hire somebody else to look after her little sister, Ri, when she can do it perfectly well. She can – she’s clearly good with kids and loves her sister – but her parents are, quite reasonably, keen for her to move out and begin her own life. None of this would matter if we weren’t supposed to root for her, but Rajkumar seems to assume that we will. It’s hard to sympathise with an 18-year-old whose main problems are that they might have to consider working for people other than their parents and that, shock horror, those parents, who have already raised a child, won’t believe that she knows more about this kind of thing than they do. Genuinely.

There’s lots to recommend The Babysitter, including an unbelievable performance from Thissy Dias-Gunasekera as the adorable Ri, so well-pitched it kind of needs to be seen to be believed; child acting is easy for adults to get wrong, but while watching Dias-Gunasekera you honestly forget that this is an actor at all. The whole cast are excellent and Rajkumar is by no means a bad writer – in fact, one suspects he might be a very good one quite soon. But the plot at the centre of The Babysitter just does not work, as Rajkumar resorts to an over-the-top demonisation of Sara and Jay, who do not think or act like middle-aged parents, so much as like angry young people might assume their parents think and act. They also have a bizarre sexual obsession with their teenage daughter that leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

All this is topped off with a swift and rather unsatisfyingly saccharine resolution, and you leave with a sense of wasted potential. It does seem that, through workshopping or dramaturgy, the problems that mar this show could probably be alleviated – but in spite of good performances, The Babysitter isn’t there yet.

The Babysitter can be seen at 14.00 at Pleasance Courtyard, every day until 25 August. For more information and tickets, visit the Edinburgh Fringe website.