A riveting show crammed with the kind of risky gags rarely heard on stage these days

How To Survive Your Mother is a play based on a memoir by political dramatist Jonathan Maitland. He portrays himself in the show, and he muses on the wisdom of turning his manipulative, devious, sex-mad mother into a dramatic heroine. In the end, he’s swayed by ‘Edinburgh derangement syndrome’ as he calls it. ‘You’re diagnosed with terminal cancer and you think: “Great, there’s a show in this.”’

Maitland’s account of his rackety childhood is crammed with risky gags rarely heard on stage these days

His mother, Bru, was a Jewish refugee from Haifa who posed as a Frenchwoman with Spanish roots to protect herself from the anti-Semitic bigotry. Her self-taught skills included seduction, bribery and fake suicide attempts. Aged 16, she was told by her father to ditch her boyfriend so she threw herself out of a fifth-floor window. ‘I broke every bone in my body,’ she says, with typical exaggeration. She doted on Maitland and sent him to boarding school where he was thrashed by the headmaster who expected to hear the young boy say ‘thank you, sir’ after each beating.

Maitland has no time for self-pity and he turns his anguish into a brilliantly entertaining show laced with his laddish, hard-bitten humour. Bru grew tired of her colourless husband, Ivor, and she asked him for a divorce during one of Maitland’s birthday parties, that was held at the Ritz. Ivor declined so Bru attempted ‘suicide’ by crashing the family car into a Park Lane roundabout, sustaining serious injuries in the process. She got her divorce. Transforming herself into an angelic businesswoman, she opened a home for geriatrics and she fed lies to the papers to attract publicity. ‘Woman with six months to live opens care home in north Cheam’, ran one headline.