Mammels is bed-ridden and so arthritic that she can only view the outside world through an angled mirror, like the Lady of Shallot. Adam, her son dances attendance upon her - but cannot, or will not, cut the apron-strings and marry a piano-teacher who is available and evidently aridity personified. The play is set in the late Sixties and Adam is redolent in his rueful, resentful attitude to sex of Philip Larkin. Adam is a "child of Empire" in the drolly ambiguous sense of not knowing who his father is, despite the family's long, if contested, history of missionary work in the colonies. The discrepant versions (everything from martyrdom to death at the circus) of his uncles' and aunts' lives is one of the comic joys of the piece. And it very much speaks to now with our ageing population and more and more people discovering that the most important relationship of their lives - indeed the only real relationship - has been with a mother or father who has come to seem indistinguishable from the phantom spouse they never had time to find. A rarely performed modern classic.| 8 May 12 to 2 Jun 12 | Jermyn Street Theatre Inner London, Greater London Performance Details => Venue archive |
