Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog

Sometimes however good the production and performances, and however much you relate to or empathise with the issues raised, you fail to engage with the play, and so it was with this. I’ve been struggling to understand why ever since it ended – too American? Dated treatment of the subject(s)? The writing itself? The fact it followed a much more successful revival of another, very different, mother-daughter story the evening before?

In Marsha Norman’s 1982 play about isolation, loneliness and depression, the relationship between mother Thelma and daughter Jessie is one of mutual dependence, with Jessie ostensibly looking after Thelma, who is effectively a companion for her troubled daughter. There’s an ordinariness about their lives, until Jessie gives her mother notice that she will shortly be killing herself and spends the rest of their time together ensuring Thelma knows where everything is and how things are done, in a very calm matter-of-fact way.

It doesn’t inform, enlighten or illuminate its themes, so it becomes a relatively emotionless tale of a woman who’s tired of living her problematic life – failed marriage, criminal son, epilepsy, loss of her beloved dad, much misunderstood – and how her mother has been hitherto somewhat oblivious to much of this. I couldn’t relate or empathise with it, and learnt little from it.

Stockard Channing (who I haven’t seen since her London stage debut in Six Degrees of Separation twenty years ago) and Rebecca Night were both excellent and director Roxana Sibert and designer Ti Green did their best with the somewhat static one room, continuous timeline material. I can think of a lot of better examples of Hampstead premieres of American plays to celebrate their 60 years, I’m afraid.