When the gauzy wall of Christina Smith’s simple but effective set swooshes up, sweeping us into the first of five apartments we will visit during Mother Play – subtitled A Play in Five Evictions – it is impossible to escape the all-commanding presence of Sigrid Thornton.
Clad in a fur coat and sporting a bouffant wig of Nicole Kidman-level mightiness, even before she is spun around to face us in a classically stylish Eames chair, her imperiously anxious Phyllis exerts the magnetic pull of a black hole.
And that’s more or less where we find ourselves in this latest work from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel, who borrows her own mother’s name and a little of their personal history. In a dingy basement apartment that Phyllis has negotiated for a steal on the back-breaking deal: her beloved son, Carl (Ash Flanders), will take out the trash.
If you ask his younger sister, Martha (Yael Stone), that could include their mother, whose absence of tenderness consumes all around her, except the scraps claimed by the cockroaches that infest their newfound home, as playfully projected by lighting designer Niklas Pajanti and, in one memorably goofy moment, portrayed by a waving puppet.
They find themselves in this perilously impoverished situation because the kids’ father, Phyllis’ philandering ex, has upped and left them. An absence rather than an unseen presence, he’s rarely mentioned. Phyllis is mostly furious that her postal service typing pool gig now must sustain all three of them.
Stone, an innately generous performer, plays Martha as a headstrong young woman constantly harried by her mother, who openly prefers Carl’s company. Attempting to keep as much distance between them as possible, she’d rather sleep on the sofa than share a room with her mother, who mostly treats Martha like bar staff. Phyllis insists her daughter keep the glass she fishes out of her Mary Poppins-style bottomless handbag constantly filled by the gin bottle that’s also dwelling down there alongside a first night feast of Maccas.
Martha also functions as our Greek chorus. Mother Play opens with her cautiously cutting through the taped-up box containing her brother Carl’s belongings. As depicted by a nattily comic Flanders, he enjoys the camp physicality of the role, flouncing around the Sumner stage as the adoring, not-yet-identified-gay son who can’t quite give up his abusive if damaged mum, long after Martha attempts to do so.
Stone and Flanders bring more depth to their characters than Vogel has written onto the page, with very little sense of who they are, as individuals, or even who they would want to be, other than free of their mother, to varying degrees. A scene in which Carl attempts to school his younger sister in how to strut through the world with confidence, rather than her belligerently slouching defence posture, isn’t exactly subtle in announcing their mutually emerging sexuality.
In its queering of the memory play, Mother Play is as much a (mostly) non-musical rendition of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home as it is Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, though the former depicts a more nuanced take on the coming-out story than we get here. Perhaps the Bechdel test could have been tweaked here to expect the siblings to talk more about something other than their mother, though the inescapable focus is right there in the overly simplistic title.
Thornton’s son-smothering mother has more to wrangle and does so magnificently as faded belle Phyllis, a thorny concoction who must be feared and adored in equal measure. Director Lee Lewis allows her star to run riot with the scenery-chewing theatrical archetype. It’s to Thornton’s great credit, as a titanically gifted performer, that she layers just enough empathy into the flinty role to maintain our sympathy for Phyllis’ situation. Though not enough to sustain an indulgently long sequence, portraying her loneliness after driving her now-adult children away, that Lewis clumsily over-eggs until it whiffs like the microwave dinners to which Phyllis is reduced.
The staging’s mightiest moment comes via the quietly foggy collapse of an old folks’ home, where Smith’s set and costume design, ably dancing through the plays’ decades-long span, shines brightest in the coolly tiled disabled bathroom where Phyllis’ once-majestic hair is torn to ratty strands. Stone adeptly portrays the frazzled grief and begrudging duty of a daughter who has more to spare than her mother ever did. And there’s another absence, this one felt more keenly as cruel fate denies Phyllis her favourite child, with a disco ball-lit sequence set in a New York gay club as yet unwitting of the horrors to come.
A family affair, right to the bitter end, Mother Play may not feel terribly original, fusing two well-worn theatrical explorations – an old soak toying with her children in her impeccably filed talons and the haunting scars of the HIV/AIDS crisis. But for all it lacks in new ideas, it has great beats in abundance, as expertly corralled by an incredible cast who know how best to move us, as their characters do through a carousel of apartments.
Mother Play is showing at the Southbank Theatre until August 2. For more information and to book tickets, head to the website.
Stay in the loop: sign up for our free Time Out Melbourne newsletter for the best of the city, straight to your inbox.