Every new mother, me included, thinks that their experience of motherhood is earth-shatteringly unique and that their insights into nappies and breast-feeding offer a truth that the writers of baby-care books and all the mothers who came before them (particularly their own) are in a conspiracy to deny.
Fortunately, we tend only to share our thoughts on sore perineums and sorer breasts with our closest friends and members of our post-natal groups. Unfortunately, in 1991 a group of Canadian actresses who had recently given birth decided to share their experiences with the world.
The result is Mum's the Word, a show so toe-curlingly inane, reactionary and embarrassing that, by the interval, I was not only entertaining fantasies of mass matricide but considering the death penalty for those committing crimes against hilarity.
This is the Vagina Monologues for the permanently engorged, with naked women streaking across the stage spraying fake breast milk and substituting talk about shit (their infant's not their own) for talk about sex (mothers, as we are constantly reminded, are just too exhausted to have sex).
In its attempts to shatter some myths and stereotypes about motherhood, the show merely sets up others. Imogen Stubbs tells us that her brain has turned to "mush" but it is the script that shows no signs of being able to support intelligent life.
Like The Vagina Monologues, the play exists in a naughty-but-nice pastel world (bonny babies bounce above the stage on cloud nests) and is coy even as it pretends to be rude. The sexual politics of the piece belongs to the 1950s; its emotional and social scope never extends beyond the concerns of fully paid-up members of the National Childbirth Trust living in the more affluent parts of the Home Counties.
The show has apparently had worldwide success, which might say something about the comedy of recognition but says more about how women collude in their enslavement. Mothers of the world unite. Boycott this show; you have everything to lose, including your brains.
· Booking until June 7. Box office: 020-7369 1740.
