Mappa Mundi

Synopsis

Jack has a dark secret and only a few months to live. When his family gather for his daughter Anna's wedding, Jack, a passionate map collector, is forced to confront the map of his own life and finds its horizons to be limited. Research into his ancestry proves him to be related to an eighteenth-century cartographer and plantation owner, but Anna, engaged to a black lawyer, is more interested to discover that they may be descended from a slave... This intimate play explores the notion of Englishness, and follows the moving journey of a man coming to terms with the parameters of his life.

Our Review:

11 November 2002

The National Theatre's production of Mappa Mundi unfortunately lost its star Ian Holm the week before it was originally due to premiere. But now that it has finally opened (for a much curtailed run of less than a month), Shelagh Stephenson's play turns out to lose its way, and its point, long before the end.

While The Memory of Water established Stephenson's credentials as a deeply sensitive, poetically driven recorder of the minute tensions and hostilities that simmer within a family dealing with the death of a matriarch, Mappa Mundi rewrites that plot with a dying father. Here, gathered around Alun Armstrong's 72-year-old Jack - the role originally to have been played by Holm - are his adult children, Michael and Anna.

Michael (Tim McInnerny) is a 45-year-old divorced, lonely actor; Anna (Lia Williams) is a 40-year-old lawyer, busily planning her wedding to fellow lawyer Sholto (Patrick Robinson). Also in t...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (213.122.132.34) - 11 November 2002:

Strongly disagree with your reviewer's take on this...I thought it was a beautiful play, excellently acted. It didn't seem contrived to me...eg the dance troupe didn't just appear at the end, it was trailed throughout, and provided an amazingly life-affirming ending that (together with the father's acceptance in the last line of the fact that this life is it, this is all there is) had me and many others the night I saw it in tears. Beautiful performances from all, and some terrific moments, like the daughter stroking her father's back and covertly inhaling his scent in order to imprint it on her memory...so true. One of the best plays around at present....

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