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Mother Adam

Jermyn Street Theatre, Inner London
From: Tuesday, 8th May 2012
To: Saturday, 2 June 2012

Our Review: Your Reviews:

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Synopsis

Mammels is bed-ridden and so arthritic that she can only view the outside world through an angled mirror, like the Lady of Shallot. Adam, her son dances attendance upon her - but cannot, or will not, cut the apron-strings and marry a piano-teacher who is available and evidently aridity personified. The play is set in the late Sixties and Adam is redolent in his rueful, resentful attitude to sex of Philip Larkin. Adam is a "child of Empire" in the drolly ambiguous sense of not knowing who his father is, despite the family's long, if contested, history of missionary work in the colonies. The discrepant versions (everything from martyrdom to death at the circus) of his uncles' and aunts' lives is one of the comic joys of the piece. And it very much speaks to now with our ageing population and more and more people discovering that the most important relationship of their lives - indeed the only real relationship - has been with a mother or father who has come to seem indistinguishable from the phantom spouse they never had time to find.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 14 May 2012

Charles Dyer’s Mother Adam, a 1972 duet for an arthritic, bed-bound Mammles and her dependent, middle-aged son, Adam, is another lost gem given a new shine in Jermyn Street, following revelatory revivals of Terence Rattigan, Tennessee Williams and Charles Morgan.

Some of these plays really do constitute the shock of the old, written with an almost unfamiliar panache in ornate language with dialogue which, as Harold Hobson said of Mother Adam, is remarkably rich “in curious eloquence and stirring images.”

Hobson counted the play one of the few real tragedies of our time, and a masterpiece; I wouldn’t go that far, but there is in Gene David Kirk’s production, and in the exquisite playing of Linda Marlowe and Jasper Britton, a disturbing and very real sense of life and happiness hanging by a thread.

The one cannot live without the other: Mammles, a former Christian missionary with a cruel line in ...

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