The Mother of the title is 47. The most significant moments of her life, she declares, were setting the table for the family breakfast and delivering the children to school. Now her days are empty. She suspects her husband of having an affair. The children are gone. Although delighted to see the back of her daughter, she longs for her son to quit his girlfriend and come home. He does (but for how long?).
Multi-award-winning French playwright Florian Zeller gives his 2010 play a destabilising structure (a feature also of his 2012 piece, The Father, which opened at this venue to great acclaim last year). Scenes are repeated, with slight variations. Some may be real, some may be projections – but which and whose? There are certainties: the mother is monomaniacal about the son; the son and the father, exasperated by her obsession, respond to her with varying degrees of condescension, disdain and neediness.
Mark Bailey’s white cube set, with walls, ceiling and floor not quite meeting, brilliantly evokes the sense of fractured reality. Christopher Hampton’s translation and Laurence Boswell’s direction bring out the humour that salvages this technically accomplished but shallow (and misogynistic) piece, while the four actors make it better than bearable, in particular Gina McKee, a mesmerising mother.
