Peter Nichols has always had a gift for dramatising common experience. And in this new play - heard in an earlier version on Radio 4 - he tackles one of the most familiar problems of the age: how to cope with a widowed 85-year-old mum no longer capable of living on her own. It's an honest, humane play that induces the pained laughter of recognition: the one thing I missed was the exuberant theatricality that characterised Nichols's earlier work.
The strength of the piece is that almost everyone in the audience, whether parent or child, will know the situation. Nichols's heroine, Alice, lives alone in a Clifton flat and has suffered a disabling fall. On her 85th birthday the family gathers to resolve what to do next. Her son Greg, a once-successful Bristol architect, and his social-worker wife have marital and professional problems of their own. And Alice's daughter Wendy is a metropolitan TV presenter struggling with an ailing career and latest toy-boy lover. No one's ready to take Alice on; and she herself rejects the idea of "some fucking awful home with all those old dames dribbling into their cardigans."
Nichols goes to the heart of the problem: Alice, like many people of her age, is physically vulnerable but spiritually independent. Meanwhile her middle-aged children, products of the age of individualism, are wrapped up in their own lives. Although Nichols is very good on the edgy awkwardness of tokenistic family celebrations, his play is haunted by an unanswered question. "Why don't you both love her?" asks Alice's granddaughter of Greg and Wendy. And it never becomes clear what has turned her children into modern, modified versions of Shakespeare's Goneril and Regan.
The Bristol-based Show of Strength, who five years ago premiered Nichols's ebullient Blue Murder, give the play a decent airing in their converted tobacco factory. It's a mistake, I think, to slice up a short work with a needless interval. But Jenny Eastop's production gets a lovely performance from Stephanie Cole who captures all of Alice's cussedness, shrewdness, self-pity and hunger for filial love. Christina Greatrex as her armour-plated daughter, Christian Rodska as her once idealistic son and Lisa Coleman as his niece with whom he's having a desperate fling also give assured performances. It may not be Nichols at his most innovative but it touches any number of exposed nerves.
Until October 14. Box office: 0117-987 7877.
