The greatest challenge in reviewing this
play is finding anything to say about it. Sarah Wooley’s first outing
in a major London space is the kind of stereotypical Hampstead fare
that this theatre has increasingly eschewed in recent years: not quite
the clichéd “adultery in NW3”, but not far off it, namely
self-discovery in suburban Surrey.
Joyce has managed to reach her senior years without doing anything much
except whatever others wanted: her mother, her husband, her daughter
and son-in-law. On being widowed of the man she was (it transpires)
blackmailed into marrying in the first place, she inherits not riches
but enough time and money to take trips into London: she goes to the
opera, to galleries and fetches up by accident in a pole-dancing bar
where she makes friends with one of the dancers. Little by little, she
finds an identity and the backbone to assert it in a family where even
omitting to pay weekly visits to hubby’s grave is a mortal sin.
In its premise, and in Wooley’s seriocomic treatment thereof, it feels
as if it could have been a BBC-TV sitcom for two or three seasons in
the late 1980s or early ’90s, quite possibly written by Carla Lane.
Which is to say that it’s well executed but there is nary a whiff of
originality. Even the mild note of generational moral ambiguity, in
that Joyce may be considered culpable for leaving her daughter’s family
to fend for themselves, was handled much more explicitly a year or two
ago by Mike Bartlett in
Love, Love,
Love, and is in any case defused here by making daughter Fiona
(Tracy-Ann Oberman) and her husband so feckless, in a middle-class way.
Maureen Lipman gives a restrained but characteristically strong
performance as Joyce, like an elderly baby bird finding its wings, and
Terry Johnson’s direction is as sure-footed as usual. Changes in
location are wittily signalled by flying down different domestic light
fittings from a clump hanging over the stage in Tim Shortall’s design.
On press night an accidental champagne spillage was deftly covered.
Really, that’s all I’ve got. This play is here for a while. Then it
will be gone, leaving as little mark as Joyce before her Indian summer.
Written for the Financial
Times.