MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD To 17 October.

Watford.

MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD
by Charlotte Keatley.

Palace Theatre To 17 October 2009.
Tue-Sat 7.45pm Mat Wed 2.30pm Sat 3pm.
Audio-described 10 Oct 3pm.
Captioned 14 Oct 7.45pm.
Runs 2hr 30min One interval.

TICKETS: 01923 225671.
www.watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 October.

Revival of a still-strong family drama.
This play is nothing like Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. Yet Delaney’s late-fifties Salford and Keatley’s Manchester across the decades are next-door to each other. Both Honey and My Mother Said were successful plays that have been widely produced, while neither author has produced much else for the stage – and nothing remotely as successful as these plays.

More importantly, both give a warm, detailed account of women’s experience, in Keatley’s case by showing four generations of a family from the early 20th-century to the play’s own day.

It suggests the relationships with men we never meet – especially of Doris, the most senior, and Jack, whose death leads to the domestic rearrangements of later scenes, and whose proposal, back in the days when such things were so serious, ends the play.

Also important are objects which the play invests with significance – a grand piano, kites, a game of solitaire; they build in significance, giving the action a unity as it moves around. How it works is something Watford’s director Brigid Larmour should know: she directed the first production at Manchester’s Contact Theatre in 1986.

Watford has a different stage, of course, and this is a different age. The play’s present-day could then be assumed; now the mid-eighties are memory or history. But it still works and bears repeated viewings as, each time, new parts of its intricate pattern fall into place.

Eve Pearce is a performer who can summon a depth of feeling in her voice, while Claire Brown shows how a young sixties woman moves from certainty in her new freedoms to realisation of the emotional weight they can bring. The youngest character, Rosie is also affected by this, and Katherine Manners gives her a teenage temper at appropriate moments alongside teenage enthusiasm and the development of a happy relation with Doris.

But Abigail Thaw (a fine actor) seems miscast at Margaret, both too young and more in the style of a sixties than a wartime child. Still, her final moments are moving and the revival overall a chance to chart the progress of women through a single family.

Rosie: Katherine Manners.
Doris: Eve Pearce.
Margaret: Abigail Thaw.
Jackie: Claire Brown.

Director: Brigid Larmour.
Designer: Ben Stones.
Lighting: Mark Jonathan.
Sound: Richmond Rudd.
Movement Coach: Shona Morris.

2009-10-08 16:55:14