When Did You Last See My Mother?

Synopsis

1965. Ian is broke, lonely and bursting with lovelorn wit. Worse, he's sharing a bedsit with the beautiful, infuriating and carefree Jimmy, who chases all the skirt he can. Just as Ian decides to give up on a London in which everyone else is having fun, the boys get a visit from Jimmy's mother. Charismatic and reckless, she opens the boys' deepest secrets and pulls them into calamitous new territory.

Our Review:

Theo Bosanquet - 19 September 2011

It’s a crying shame this thrilling 1964 play by Christopher Hampton, written when he was still a teenager, has gone unseen for so many years.

Not least because it contains in central protagonist Ian a character to rival Jimmy Porter, Mr Sloane and Alex in A Clockwork Orange as a role to put a young actor on the map. And this production certainly does that with former Harry Potter star Harry Melling.

Ian is an 18-year-old with a vocabulary and a sensibility way beyond his years. In verbal spars with bedsit-mate Jimmy, he reveals a rapier wit and a crippling combination of sexual assuredness and confusion, aiming his teenage frustrations at the extraordinarily ordinary Dennis.

His unreciprocated passion soon finds an outlet when Jimmy’s attractive young mother comes for tea. As lost souls compelled by a near-Oedipal urge, the unlikely couple soon begin an affair that is to have devastating consequences.

It’s easy t...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 30 September 2011:

Christopher Hampton was even younger than Tom Stoppard when his first play was produced in the West End. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead displayed Stopard's typical wit but also a tendency to show off. Although the title is Stoppardian Hampton was clearly mining his own background, or wishful thinking, and heavily influenced by the Royal Court stable of writers. Harry Melling has received considerable praise for his performance as Ian who, despite gay longings for his flatmate Jimmy, allows himself to be seduced by Jimmy's mother. However, I thought he was overly mannered and considered, too obviously channelling Alan Bennett but at considerably more volume. Frankly being shouted at for over two hours in such a confined space becomes tiresome and erodes any sympathy for the character's self-imposed loneliness. It could be argued that Hampton never completely fulfilled his potential as a playwright gaining more recognition for adaptations and screenplays. Now that the Royal Court seems to be discovering a series of new teenage prodigies it will be interesting to see how they develop....

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