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.
When Maitland reached adolescence, Bru threw him out and denounced his girlfriend as ‘a slut’. She coolly informed him that he wasn’t her natural son. Her baby was born dead, she claimed, and the sympathetic midwives gave her a prostitute’s child to care for in its place. ‘You’re the son of a whore,’ she tells him. This was another lie, of course, and when Maitland became a BBC reporter he discovered the scale of her deception and the underhand methods she used to extract cash from dotty old men at her care home.
On paper her personality seems too loathsome, shallow and cruel for a drama – but on stage she’s not just absorbing but easy to like because her aims are so transparent. She wants to grab everything she can for herself, right now, this minute, and she’s driven by the simple animal hunger of a fairy-tale monster. Maitland never shrinks from the truth and this bracing account of his rackety childhood is crammed with risky gags that are rarely heard on stage these days because our theatres have become prissy and fearful. A riveting show.
Reykjavik is about deep-sea fishing in Hull in the mid-1970s. Donald is the wealthy owner of a fleet which suffered the loss of a ship off the coast of Iceland. The survivors are lodged in a hotel in Reykjavik awaiting a visit from Donald, but first he must tour the homes of the bereaved families in Hull. This ordeal is known as the ‘widows’ walk’. His personal life is a mess and he receives a flirtatious invitation from a housewife whose husband mistreats her.
The slow and intense first act of Richard Bean’s new play builds the dramatic tension with exquisite care. Donald, the troubled boss, is played with a blend of steely calculation and affable tenderness by John Hollingworth. Anna Reid’s painterly set is a confection of blacks, browns and ochres that gives Donald’s luxurious office the eerie feeling of a prison cell. In the second half, the play falls to pieces entirely.
The location shifts to a cheap hotel in Reykjavik and all the actors are recast as brand new characters. Instead of a tightly-plotted melodrama, the script descends into a meandering series of second-hand stories and random accidents.
A storm howls, a window breaks, a card trick is played, a knife-fight comes to nothing, a barmaid is kissed by a randy trawlerman, and someone sets fire to a plate of chips belonging to someone else. Everything is shapeless and chaotic. The doors bang open and a coffin is dragged on stage containing the corpse of a fisherman – but even this surprise event fails to raise any dramatic interest, let alone any laughs.
To pass the time, the brainless trawlermen sing songs and tell yarns about ships haunted by ghosts, but their tittle-tattle has no bearing on the main story. The odd reference to anti-capitalist revolutions and to the conflict over fishing rights in Iceland’s coastal waters aren’t enough to give the show any weight as a documentary.
Doubtless the script accurately depicts the inane rabbitings of stranded mariners amusing each other with tales of extraordinary heroism on the high seas, but it’s a frustrating experience for the playgoer. What’s needed is a decent story rather than a sack of overheard waffle.
Comments