Aunt Dan and Lemon

Synopsis

An acerbic comedy, Lemon a frail young woman, relives her strange and subversive relationship with the darkly charismatic Aunt Dan. 'Aunt Dan and the Lemon' was first presented at the Royal Court Theatre in 1985 and subsequently at Joe Papp's Public Theater in New York.

Our Review:

28 May 2009

The Wallace Shawn season at the Royal Court has been a triumph. Dominic Cooke’s programme is further vindicated by his own revival of a play - starring Jane Horrocks and Lorraine Ashbourne, both superb - that in 1985 sealed a fruitful collaboration between this theatre, and its then director Max Stafford-Clark, and Joe Papp’s Public in New York.

Aunt Dan is the friend of Lemon’s parents who made a deep impression on her when young. Now Lemon, a sickly spinster addicted to fruit and vegetable juices, welcomes us to the theatre as punters in search of a “special treat”. She is obviously related to Shawn’s own alter ego in the new play, Grasses of a Thousand Colours, in the Theatre Upstairs.

Related in the sense of telling us something in a strange, informal manner, as if entranced by her own memory. The play boils down to a discussion of how the unconventional views of Aunt Dan filtered into Lemon’s life, producing in her a philosophical f...

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Latest User Review

rds - 5 June 2009:

Gareth James sums it all up perfectly, but I might add it was also interminable, hence, no doubt, why so many patrons decided to up sticks and leave, rather noisily in many cases, throughout the performance. A duff piece to follow some very good ones of late at the RC. I wouldn't have minded so much if it wasn't for the fact the RC had already tried the thing out before, but then I suppose that was 24 years ago!...

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