Theatre
In the name of the mother
Published 13 September 2007
Almodóvar's film classic retains its unconventional power on the stage
All About My Mother Old Vic, London SE1
Transforming Pedro Almodóvar's Oscar-winning 1999 film All About My Mother into a stage production at the Old Vic is a hugely ambitious task. The cast must juggle not only with rapidly changing locations (including a traffic-heavy roadside, the interior of a theatre, a nunnery and an art gallery), but also with a layered sense of time and a tier of internalised space - all of which is so much more tricky in theatre's thumping present tense than in film, which by its nature is evanescent.
Wisely, perhaps, the writer-adaptor, Samuel Adamson, and the director, Tom Cairns, seem to be less concerned with lifting every moment from the big screen than intent on providing a wholly dramatic evening that boils down to a powerful essay on the nature of motherhood.
The show begins by wrong-footing the audience. Manuela (Lesley Manville), a single parent and hospital nurse, is acting out the role of a recently bereaved mother for the benefit of a trainee doctor. Later, she takes her real-life son, Esteban (played by Colin Morgan), out to celebrate his 17th birthday with a night watching the famous actress Huma Rojo (Diana Rigg) as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Afterwards, in a doomed attempt to get Rojo's autograph as she leaves the theatre, Esteban is knocked down and killed by a car. Cruelly, Manuela must now in real life become the very character she has pretended to be at the hospital.
After this prologue, the play follows Manuela's attempts to come to terms with the tragedy of losing her only child. She returns to Barcelona in search of the boy's missing father, where she hooks up with Agrado, a six-foot-tall transvestite, played gloriously by Mark Gatiss in a bad wig and an even dodgier Welsh accent. While Agrado might be a conventionally jokey tranny ("tits and balls - a deadly combination", he says self-deprecatingly at one point) Manuela is a classic pietŕ figure, combining nurture and grief in a single icon of motherhood. But she is also a typically forthright Almodóvar heroine: thoroughly contemporary, and perfectly willing to dress up as a hooker in order to get a job.
As the play's title suggests, this is no bloke's night out. In the events framed by Hildegard Bechtler's colour-drenched set, which indicates location with a selection of rapidly shifting planes, we are presented with a variety of female experiences. These range from the young, well-meaning (and frankly rather irritating) nun Sister Rosa (Joanne Froggatt), who just wants to "help" everyone, to her arty mother (Eleanor Bron), a middle-class snob who makes a living painting fake Picassos and whose emotional breadth is as limited as her creative talents. Almodóvar's women are certainly not brittle goddesses. They are more like resigned, stumbling workers living on the edge: "fucking idiots", Manuela calls them. Never mind. With a plot that hurls a gamut of needy invalids, infants and addicts into the mix, women are also depicted as the essence of life itself, and their maternal instinct as the most powerful force imaginable.
Towering above a uniformly fine company are Manville and Rigg. Manville is small and pale, her spirit etched with a grief that never quite leaves her. She is a perfect foil to the permanently glamorous Rigg, a lesbian diva given to sweeping in and out of doors in cape and sunglasses, but forever trying to prop up her girlfriend, a selfish junkie of small talent. The two women are like a twin set of stars, the one circling the other, both driven by a profound and aching need. In the thundering last scene (in which Rigg shows how she has managed to stay at the top of her career for 40 years), it is clear that each has managed to secure lasting fulfilment for the other, albeit in a startlingly unconventional manner.
For further info and booking details log on to: http://www.oldvictheatre.com
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