Until 2nd June

Jermyn Street Theatre
presents
MOTHER ADAM

No. 1 Critic's Choice THE TIMES

A hilarious black comedy
by Charles Dyer

Directed by Gene David Kirk

Designed by Cherry Truluck
Lighting & Sound Design Phil Hewitt


Mammles is bed-ridden and so arthritic that she can only view the outside world through an angled mirror, like the Lady of Shallot. Adam, her son, dances attendance upon her - but cannot, or will not, cut the apron-strings and marry a piano-teacher who is available and evidently aridity personified. The play is set in the late Fifties and Adam, in his rueful, resentful attitude to the nascent sexual revolution, is reminiscent of Philip Larkin.

Adam is a "child of Empire" in the drolly ambiguous sense of not knowing who his father is, despite the family's long, if contested, history of missionary work. The discrepant versions (everything from martyrdom to death at the circus) of his uncles' and aunts' lives is one of the comic joys of the piece.

And it very much speaks to now with our ageing population and more and more people discovering that the most important relationship of their lives - indeed the only real relationship - has been with a mother or father who has come to seem indistinguishable from the phantom spouse they never had time to find.

**** Imagine Steptoe and Son rewritten (with a female parent, and within a middle-class) by an improbably co-operative committee of Beckett, Stoppard and Kenneth Williams, with Stanley Unwin as linguistic consultant. Then imagine it performed, pitch-perfect, by Jasper Britton and Linda Marlowe. Libby Purves, The Times

**** Resplendent in a tangerine toque and monitoring her middle-aged son with a manipulative, faux-beaten-dog wariness, Linda Marlowe's marvellous Mammles looks like the lost love child of Gloria Swanson and Albert Steptoe in Gene David Kirk's revelatory and richly entertaining revival of Mother Adam (1971). Paul Taylor, The Independent

**** Hobson counted the play one of the few real tragedies of our time, and a masterpiece; I wouldn't go that far, but there is in Gene David Kirk's production, and in the exquisite playing of Linda Marlowe and Jasper Britton, a disturbing and very real sense of life and happiness hanging by a thread. Michael Coveney, WhatsonStage

*** [Jasper] Britton, giving one of the best performances in London, matches it for flamboyance, but also cuts through to the source of Adam's pain. Linda Marlowe finds a sweetness in his gnarled mother, and Gene David Kirk's production provides the best showcase for a play that might otherwise have gone another 40 years unseen. Matt Trueman, Time Out

Brittle necessity in confined relationship played with supreme skill. ReviewsGate

CAST:
Linda Marlowe and Jasper Britton


Monday to Saturday 7.30pm Saturday matinees 3.30pm

£18.00 & £15.00 concessions.

Call the Box Office on: 020 7287 2875 On online: Click Here for Tickets