Marsha Norman’s mother-daughter drama is driven by the theatrical principle of Chekhov’s gun: a pistol is introduced in the opening, retrieved from a dusty attic, and the prospect of its firing is what motors the play to its final moments.
“I’m going to kill myself, mama,” says Jessie, a epileptic woman whose life has wilted and who lives with her mother, Thelma.
But this does not quite bring the tension or dread it should in Roxana Silbert’s production, although there are interesting exchanges on reasons for living or choosing to die, as well as responsibility and maternal guilt for family trauma.
The Pulitzer prize-winning play, which had its UK premiere at the Hampstead theatre in 1985, deals in difficult themes but its dramatic power feels oddly muted – more cerebral than emotional in its effects but not really treading new ground, even then.
It takes place over one night, in a brightly lit kitchen-cum-living room (designed by Ti Green) and contains the familiar tropes of mother-daughter dramas, from co-dependency to the inversion of roles: Jessie mothers her mother to the point where she makes meticulous plans for Thelma to carry out after her death. Her controlling nature reaches unbelievable levels when she tells Thelma what to say at her memorial and presents gifts to be unwrapped at future Christmases. Thelma, for her part, occasionally acts like a stroppy teenager, throwing around the pots and pans, but the dynamic between the women does not feel very sharp-edged or complicated.
Stockard Channing’s increasingly desperate mother is still compelling to watch and while she gives a charismatic performance her emotional range is hemmed in by the sedate, discursive tone of the production.
Rebecca Night’s Jessie is a trickier character to pull off; she is a picture of certitude with no doubt or fear in her grimly determined suicidal mindset. “I say no … to hope,” she says, which sounds both awful and an assertion of agency. But emotionally she is a brick wall of a character and so the women’s relationship has nowhere to go beyond pleading on Thelma’s part and insistence on Jessie’s.
There is occasional humour and some insights on what is said or withheld at the point of death in their discussion on Jessie’s father and his stubborn deathbed silence towards Thelma. Powerful moments arise but the play does not have the devastating effect it should, even after the gun has gone off.
At Hampstead theatre, London, until 4 December
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
