Stuffed but dissatisfied

Sandi Toksvig’s new play opens in a Gravesend care home where five grannies and a temporary nurse are threatened by rising floodwaters. In Act One the ladies prepare for a rescue party that fails to materialise. In Act Two they build a life raft out of plastic bottles. There’s a bizarre sequence involving a silly young burglar who gets beaten up and flung through a window by a woman of 71. The ending is more of a petering out than a conclusion. All the characters feel interchangeable apart from the nurse, who claims to come from Cheltenham. Her name, Hope Daly, prompts one of the old dears to quip. ‘My life in a nutshell.’ Later Hope admits, ‘I’m from Croydon, OK? I don’t tell people because I don’t need the pity.’

The play’s great virtue is its mood of lyrical whimsicality. ‘I love a homosexual, they’re so clean,’ says one of the dears. ‘I was the first in our village to get a mobile phone. I knitted it a cover.’ Ms Toksvig perfectly understands the cultural mindset of her audience and she shamelessly flatters all their quirks and prejudices. She’s aiming for the Radio 4 demographic: middle-aged, nostalgic, feminine, educated but anti-intellectual, utterly English and cosily snobbish. To these people the only part of the world that matters is the Home Counties. Northerners are poor, surly and amusing. Foreigners are quaint or dangerous. Or a bit of both. ‘I know she was Polish but otherwise she looked harmless.’ Anyone brought up on a south London estate, like Hope, is regarded as the victim of a prank in rather questionable taste.

The play’s second act is darkened by passages of macabre reminiscence with one of the grannies admitting that she facilitated her husband’s death and another regretting that she gave birth to ‘three little sods.