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My Mother Said I Never Should/The Ladykillers review – love trumps farce

★★★★☆/★★☆☆☆

Theatre by the Lake, Keswick
Charlotte Keatley’s 1987 work about mothers and daughters is a wonderful gesture of empathy, while a staging of the Ealing black comedy fails to find the funny

Charlotte Keatley has an acute ear for the way mothers talk to daughters – and how daughters respond. Straddling four generations, yet structured as if time doesn’t exist, My Mother Said I Never Should is brilliant in its observational detail. It captures every subtextual nuance in the conversations of those mothers who can’t stop parenting and the children who can’t stop answering back.

But what her 1987 play also shows is how we are all products of historical circumstance. It isn’t temperament that embitters a woman who sacrificed everything to survive the war; nor is it a personality quirk that confounds a woman who was brought up to be a housewife when economics compel her to get a job. Their experiences made them that way.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2I8IxBB
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