A MOTHER’S LIFE, A SON’S PERSPECTIVE
Sometimes it is almost useful to be a day late (sorry, tied up yesterday) because it gives a chance to read other people’s take on the play you saw. Especially if they liked it more than you: look back at notes and memory, and consider what you missed.
I was oddly resistant to Alexander Zeldin’s evocation of his mother’s life – hers and her generation’s, taken from close interviews not only with her but with peers. It’s almost my generation, though the mother is a decade years older: it spans Australia 1943 to London 2021. Obviously I really wanted to like it, since growing up with postwar parental attitudes and living through the hippie 60s and 70s was part of my own life. Zeldin’s empathy and tenderness is much admired, and this play is on tour around Europe in co-production.
And there is nothing to dislike in the performances – Amelda Brown as the diffident old woman Alice, unsure whether anyone will be interested in her, strolling on before the curtain and – once – avenging a sexual assault on her younger self. Eryn Jean Norvill is Alice through her life: sweetly shy teenager wanting a life of art and writing but married to a domineering navy boyfriend, escaping, finding a boho life with arty friends, escaping again to Europe and finally the Uk where she finds real if unlikely love with an elderly Jewish-Austrian refugee in a library, telling him “I want your children!”
She is good, and so are the supporting cast: Joe Bannister as two variously horrible men, Pamela Rabe as the mother she rejects, and an awful early-Germaine-Greer period figure, a sweaty boozy man-hating man-eater in the hippie household. Indeed come to think of it, there is a kind of tribute in my impatient loathing of all those scenes of pretentious, predatory ‘70s free-loving arty-academia friends (“I feel a need to penetrate the earth…fuck the paintings..” . It’s altogether too credible, if you were there. Maybe that is what made me impatient, anhedonic, unconnected to the show. But that, as I say, is a sort of tribute: making loathsome people and cultures properly loathsome is a skill.
But it might also have been the direction. I liked the way the set folds, unfolds and vanishes around Alice, the way it does all around us as life’s scene-shifters move us on. But within those shifting kitchen scenes the dialogue is so hyper-real, almost like drama-school improv at times, and to be honest, not always audible. Even in Row M. And although it is only near the end that we see the male onlooker, the devoted son (avatar of Zeldin himself) , it does not feel like the account of a life which a woman would have given herself. Not a woman of spirit, as Alice clearly is. There’s no sense of laughing acceptance, no grown wisdom. Rather there’s a kind of cloying pity in the play: Mum is there to be maltreated and undervalued by the culture but appreciated by her boy. And in the final scene when the old woman remembers how pelican mothers tear at their own breasts to feed their young, it feels like a son’s sentimentality about how much she loved him.
Especially that grates if your mind goes back to Alice’s cruel, rejecting scorn when her own despised mother makes her a hat for her birthday and she throws it on the ground. So there you are: nicely made, well-intentioned, made with love, but for me not a good evening. But read the other critics – it may well be a good one for you.
Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 4 november
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