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My Mother tries too hard to be the reel thing
ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER
Old Vic Theatre
ALL About My Mother is a great film. Sam Adamson’s reworking is a good play, but if that reads like damning with faint praise it is only a testament to the inimitable quality of the original.
Lesley Manville is assured as Manuela, the single mother who refuses to let her teenage son Esteban (Colin Morgan) know about his father and her murky past. However, after he is run over waiting outside a theatre for Diana Rigg’s majestic lesbian grande dame, Huma Rojo, Manuela is moved to track down his transvestite father, Lola (Michael Shaeffer) confronting the Barcelona underworld she left 18 years previously to have her baby.
On the way, she is drawn to Rojo and a pregnant nun, Rosa, and moves the dysfunctional worlds together towards the heartbreakingly open-ended conclusion, which offers closure only to the dead.
In many ways, the 1999 Oscar winner ought to lend itself well to the theatre. Aside from the references to A Streetcar Named Desire and All About Eve, the smaller stage feels fitting for the internal emotional logic which beats at the heart of the story, and allows transvestite whores, forgerers, nurses and nuns to be weaved together so smoothly.
But it lacks the richness and visual subtlety of the screen.
The stage is not precise enough for this, so the more extreme characters – Mark Gatiss’s excellent Agrado in particular – succeed more than the saner ones, who are not helped by a technically impressive but overwrought set.
Towards the end Agrado tells the audience, “We are more authentic the closer we are to the person we dream of being.”
Perhaps so – this is still an enjoyable two hours.
But there is an irony in that the play’s flaws come from trying too hard to be like its inspiration.
Until November 4
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