Theatre - A superb portrait of enforced intimacy makes us suffer as much as laugh, writes Michael Portillo Smaller Lyric Theatre, London W1

"Half your family has pissed off to Spain and the other half is just pissed off." This line, deliv-ered by Dawn French in Carmel Morgan's first stage play, sums up the basic plot of Smaller. French is Bernice Clulow, who for 25 years has looked after her widowed and handicapped mother, while Bernice's sister, Cath (the singer Alison Moyet), lives a life of hedonism in southern Spain.

The relationship between Bernice and her mother, Maureen (June Watson), is the mainstay of the piece, and the dialogue is painfully funny. The curtain rises as Bernice returns from a day's teaching a few minutes later than Maureen had expected, and the old lady is bursting. We are spared no detail as Bernice hauls her into a wheelchair, pushes her along to the bathroom and there deposits her on the lavatory. No sound effect is left to the imagination. Bernice then wipes her mother. By the second act she is donning rubber gloves to push Maureen's piles back into place.

Bernice and Maureen are, as so often in comedy since Beckett, a couple locked in a relationship of mutual dependence and recrimination. The mother behaves selfishly, showing little appreciation of her daughter's caring. She begrudges her even a few moments in the pub after school and chats idiotically while Bernice is marking papers. She dwells on the pain that she suffers and harps on about going into a home. Most gallingly, she goads Bernice but lights up with joy whenever the distant Cath rings or sends a postcard.

Morgan, a scriptwriter on Coronation Street, has written convincing dialogue. Maureen is a beautifully constructed character, a woman who must fill her chair-bound days with soaps, snooping and religiosity. She is sustained by scraps of information about her neighbours and snippets of gossip from Bernice's staffroom, along with visits from the parish priest. We are driven to distraction by her inanities and her obsession with clearing windblown litter from her garden. We are indignant about her cruel mockery of Bernice's lack of success with men.

Watson is marvellous as Maureen. She delivers every line in a loud voice and at a high pitch that is truly maddening. She holds her head erect with irritating self-righteousness. At one moment, she delivers a brilliantly unexpected obscenity, so well-timed it produces the loudest guffaw of the evening. Yet when her health sharply deteriorates, we feel with Bernice a rush of sorrow and contrition.

The play is tailor-made for French. Bernice is an intelligent woman with an excellent line in wit and a strong love for her mother that has survived their quarter-century of enforced intimacy. She scarcely bothers to disguise her resentment of the loafer sister, yet makes light of her lack of any social or love life. French is a comic genius. She varies the tone of her lines in a way that always surprises. Her range of gestures and facial expressions is hilarious. In one scene, her mother is prattling on and Bernice has shut out her voice, but she acknowledges every triviality on auto pilot. Each interjection is excellently judged.

There are failings in the writing. The play takes a long time to end. And the third character is less successful - Moyet sings more than she acts. We first discover her in a purple flamenco dress, complete with mantilla and fan. At that stage, we do not know that she makes her living at a ghastly tourist nightspot in Puerto Banus. I did not like the songs, a mixture of dirge and melodrama, which Moyet co-wrote with Pete Glen ister. Naturally, Moyet is acted off the stage when she appears beside French. But she enjoys a glorious moment when she performs for the Costa's iced Guinness brigade dressed in a chicken costume and, in a woeful impersonation of Robbie Williams, executes a series of excruciatingly inept dance moves.

The play offers some thoughtful insights. There is a moment, just one, when Maureen, speaking to Bernice, recognises that "I've had my life, and I've had yours, too". When Cath comes home, Bernice turns her fury and envy upon her, begrudg- ing her sister her freedoms and her affairs. But Cath turns the tables, accusing Bernice of having "guilt-tripped" her for a quarter of a century. She demands that she drop her martyr act. Bernice has come to depend on the one thing that defines her: being a carer.

Sure enough, when Maureen dies, Bernice is at a loss. She has become stuck in her role just like her mother, and has absorbed many of Maureen's quirks and obsessions. I sat next to two sisters, who remarked that they could see themselves as Bernice and Cath in five years' time. Morgan's script touches the agony or anxiety in many people's lives, and she makes us suffer as much as laugh. That is the measure of her achievement.

Booking on 020 7494 5045 until 20 May

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