Mother and Child review: A family reunion staged as a psychological drama

Mother and Child

Glass Mask Theatre at Bestseller, Dublin

★★★☆☆

“I can’t all of a sudden start talking”, says a reluctant young man in Jon Fosse’s fraught play. Reunited for the first time in many years with his chatty mother, who’s looking for a debrief as if they’re casually catching up, he’s finding it difficult to play along.

Arriving at her glossily decorated Oslo home, the son – played by Kyle Hixon – looks on angrily as his mother, wine in hand, makes excuses for why she never sees him, complaining about the vast distance separating the city from his home in western Norway. It’s a rambling tirade that eventually corkscrews into a subtle accusation: “I hardly ever see you,” she teases.

The distance between parent and child is difficult to traverse in the Nobel laureate’s play. First staged in 1997, its politics reflect its era; the mother, in Carmel Stephens’s performance, prides herself on leaving her rural upbringing to become a well-paid public servant, unsure whether to admonish other women (“I’ve always liked men better”) or come out in support of them (“I’ve always been, you know, a feminist”). She is her own success story, but when she insists that her son reminisces about a happy childhood moment, he reminds her of failure. “You just left!” he says, describing a painful history wherein she abandoned him, leaving him to be raised by a puritanical grandmother instead.

[ Nobel prize-winning author Jon Fosse on giving up alcohol and converting to Catholicism ]

Those echoes of religious conservatism, familiar in Ireland as well, may explain the decision of Johan Bark, the director of this Glass Mask Theatre production, to present a version of Oslo where characters speak with Irish accents; if the Irish mammy is often presented as wackily old-school, and uncertainly affectionate or threatening, then you’ll shudder at Stephens’s mother, who, with a total lack of boundaries, tries on a performance of girlish youthfulness, and asks her son for a cigarette as if she were Betty Boop flirting with a sailor.

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Searching for a defence to justify leaving her child to embark on a career, the mother spins a contrived theory, even accusing him of being antifeminist. There is something more simplistically compelling about the tension of the play, in pitting a son’s legitimate pain at abandonment against a mother’s feelings of not wanting to apologise for being ambitious. Those emotions might be better mapped by a less restless production; Bark, attracted to abstract movement and unnerving sound effects, seems set on staging it as a psychological trauma.

The overspill of a Strindbergian anxiety dream risks loosening the play’s focus. When questioning her son about his time studying literature in Galway, she makes presumptions about his reading list: “Beckett for sure, since it was Ireland.” Theirs certainly resembles a Beckettian double act, with one power-holding character doing nearly all of the talking while pestering the other. But this production has none of that oppressive intimacy; even as mother and child both discover they are sad products of their upbringings, there is missed vulnerability when he reveals a simple, profound yearning: “I came to visit you.”

Mother and Child, staged by Glass Mask Theatre, is at Bestseller, Dublin, until Saturday, April 6th