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Pencils, plumbing and pills

One morning last week My Loved One strode (yes, strode – not shambled, shuffled or trudged) into my office. He’d been to Beckenham, on one of his single target excursions to take a package to the Post Office. Now, in Beckenham  the Post Office is within WH Smiths where, on his own initiative he had stopped off and bought a couple of packet of the plastic propelling pencils we both like. It’s an old joke that neither of us can ever find one because they’re so gregarious that they like to hold meetings in my handbag or violin case.  “I’m rationing you to two of these new ones”  said MLO with an assertive twinkle. “If I let you have any more you’ll only eat them”. It was, for a few moments as if I had my husband back – the man who could run a business, manage files, administer the household as well as being someone I could, and often did, lean on heavily to keep everything running smoothly. Ms Alzheimer’s was nowhere to be seen. She was banished. There we were, just the two of us – grinning at each other. Equal partners,

Of course it didn’t last. This disease doesn’t go away. There is no such thing as “remission”. If you’ve got it, you’ve got it. A few days later we came in from a reasonably constructive, congenial afternoon’s gardening to find an alarming, growing, puddle on the kitchen floor. MLO did a lot of handwringing and negative muttering while I got down (a long way down) to mopping it up and phoning our plumber son for help. Eventually, flat on my stomach on a very wet floor, getting soggier by the minute – having pulled all the kick panels off – phone glued to my ear, I ascertained that the waste pipe had separated from the outlet under the sink. An hour later and, with verbal guidance from the family plumber, I had effected a temporary fix. Shall I add plumbing to my ever growing CV? Maybe not.  The reason I mention this incident here is that throughout the damp drama MLO simply hovered, looked anxious and vaguely relieved that someone was dealing with it. Ms A was definitely in the kitchen with a vengeance. I hope she got horribly wet feet. And a nasty chill.

Every day at least one person kindly asks me how MLO is.  Most people are terrifically supportive and sympathetic, by the way. There’s not a lot they can do in practice but the warmth helps.  I just answer “Well up and down. Good days and bad days .. you know? You just have to take each day as it comes”. They then commend me for coping with it all so positively. As if I have a choice. The pencils followed by the plumbing are a good couple of illustrations of just how yo-yo like, life with Ms A really is. You have to go with the flow and hope it won’t be literally across the kitchen floor.

Four months after the April meeting at which we were given the devastating diagnosis, MLO has just had a follow up appointment with the consultant. At last he now has some medication. There were delays because of a couple of minor medical issues, now successfully negotiated. The drug is called Memantine – in case you’re interested in the technicalities – and he’s on an escalating dose over four weeks. It’s helpfully categorised as an “anti-Alzheimer’s medicine” (and there was I thinking it was a cold cure – silly me) and is supposed to work on the receptors in the brain which deal with memory. “Some people find it useful” said the consultant cautiously. Well, it’s early days and this week he’s on only a quarter of the target dose but the lack of side effects thus far is encouraging. And maybe, just maybe, it will help to lessen Ms A’s grip a little as least in the short term

A few more pencil days and rather fewer plumbing days would be good. But I’m not holding my breath. Hope has to be tempered with realism when you have Ms A in residence.

I sometimes wonder why we eccentric British persist with open air theatre – a triumph of hope over experience if ever there was one. We do not have Italian weather and I’ve often been very wet, very cold or both. Then I see something like Illyria’s The Mikado or Jesus Christ Superstar at Regents Park – both on pleasantly fine evenings last month – and of course I  know why we do it. When open air theatre works and the weather gods are smiling, there is nothing like it. It’s a fantastic experience for cast, creatives, audience and everyone else involved.

It’s a growing, developing  field of work too. Open Air Theatre, Regents Park is now a very different animal from the 1930s grassy amphitheatre whose programming could have been described as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and other plays.” Today, Timothy Sheader and his team present cutting edge, innovative work (which increasingly often transfers) every year. The opening of Shakespeare’s Globe in 1997 has moved things on tremendously during the last 20 years too. And there seem to be ever more small touring companies, taking work, which is often very high quality, out to communities. I saw the Illyria Mikado, for example in a  Kent garden centre and I caught up with Changeling Theatre’s Hamlet (watch out for Alex Phelps – wonderful in title role) in the bombed ruins of the Garrison Church in Woolwich.

Given that, against all the odds, we do so much open air theatre so successfully in Britain, why does it feature so little in drama school training? It comes with very specific challenges. Ask actors such as Matthew Needham (currently wowing the crowds at The Globe as Benedick in Matthew Dunster’s Much Ado About Nothing) about verse speaking under the Heathrow, up-the-Thames flightpath for example – not to mention low hovering helicopters which, I sometimes suspect come down deliberately just for a look and to annoy actors and their audience. Touring open air theatre often pops up in country parks and stately homes where actors have to be audible over shrieking peacocks. And even trees make a lot of noise when a breeze ruffles their leaves. I thought the youth theatre actors in Chichester Festival Theatre’s Grimm Tales did extraordinarily well this summer in the leafy Cass Sculpture Park, for example.

It isn’t just making yourself heard either. Open air actors have to manage an intimacy with their audience which would be unusual in an indoor auditorium. They often mingle before and after the show – even during the interval. And the punters are very close during the show itself – often picnicking on the grass just a few feet away. It’s a skill which actors have to learn to carry off. There’s more dependence on physical theatre too as, on a summer evening, the first half of the show is largely unlit so each performer is very exposed and has to establish presence through action.

I think drama schools which don’t do it should think seriously about taking students out on at least one outdoor tour, or mount a static outdoor show, to teach them some of these skills. And well done Jo Hawes and Marylyn Phillips – whose new training initiative, The Rep Company, is considering doing a site specific, possibly  outdoor show next summer.  It’s so much better to have some awareness and experience under your belt rather than having to pick these skills up, from scratch, as you go along.   Open air theatre has become mainstream and “Industry readiness” should include it.

Money is becoming a problem in the household I share with My Loved One and the loathed Ms Alzheimers.

Don’t squirm. This is not a fundraising appeal. I have worked flat out all my adult life often doing several jobs at once, lived within my income and always saved a bit. MLO has worked just as hard, for many years as a mind-blowingly efficient househusband between bouts of employment as an education administrator. In latter years he has also run my writing business – doing just about everything except the writing although he’s now fully retired from it, thanks to Ms A. The result of all this endeavour is that we can pay our bills and afford the occasional take away curry. We’re not wealthy (whatever that means) but there’s certainly no need to pass the hat round.

No. Our money worries relate to something else.  MLO is finding it increasingly difficult to manage it – whether it’s the notes and coins in his pocket or funds in the bank. When we went to Malaysia in March he bought some ringgets in advance – as you do. It was a wad of notes which we put carefully in one of the pockets of his man-bag. For most of the first week we were away he told me several times a day that he was very worried because he’d lost that money or perhaps left it at home. Each time he mentioned it, I showed him where it was.  It was a conversation that went round and round like a stuck gramophone record. Back in blighty we’ve had exactly the same issue with the little bank bag of coins he carries with him –  he frets continuously that he’s lost it. He hasn’t.

We’ve always had separate bank accounts –  plus one joint one which pays for household stuff, now entirely managed online by me. This means that I don’t know – and have never cared as long as there was enough day-to-day money for what we needed or wanted to do – the details of his savings accounts, ISAs and so on. Well, assisted by our very practical elder son, we have now been through all the muddled files. And I’ve lost count of the number of accounts we’ve found with small forgotten sums in them. We’ve closed most of them now and tided everything up. MLO, meanwhile. just looks on, bemusedly saying things like “Well, I didn’t know I’d got that” as if it were someone else’s affairs – which I suppose in a way it is. The man who only two or three years ago had impeccably orderly paperwork (he’s never really trusted online banking) which told him, literally, to the penny exactly what was where, has gone. In his place is a financially helpless old chap with Ms A on his shoulder sneering. And I try to shake my fist at her rather than breaking down and howling at the misery of it.  I don’t always succeed

Not, obviously that this is all bad. It’s much better to find little bits of money you didn’t know you had than it is to uncover the horror of debt you weren’t aware of. Always look on the bright side. Or try to.

When I was a child we knew several old ladies who “went funny in the head”. Then, eventually, when their relations, had to sort out the house, it was quite common to find 100s of pounds hidden away and forgotten – like squirrels with their acorns. Well a couple of generations later, we all use cash much less but money is still something which dogs a diseased mind. I suppose it’s because we were taught from infancy that it is very important and must be kept carefully and safely. These days there are debit and credit card issues too. MLO keeps his in a wallet in his man- bag (I could write a whole blog about that bag – and perhaps I will) frequently telling me in a panicky voice that he’s lost this card or that. Then I look and find it in the accustomed place. Another worry dispelled – for half an hour, anyway.

It’s the stress and anxiety which worrying about all this causes him which is the saddest thing. Money worries of any sort are deeply debilitating.  I have activated the Enduring Power of Attorney (now known as a Lasting Power of Attorney or LPA) which MLO signed in the early 1990s and have a stash of certified copies ready to register with banks. I’m reluctant, though, to take away from MLO all control over his money until I really have to. He’s been grown up for a long time and I have to maintain the illusion for as long as possible. To do otherwise is to hammer yet one more nail into the coffin containing his independence. Difficult balance.

 

 

Illyria, touring

Whoever would have thought that you could bring The Mikado off with a cast of six? Well, Illyria certainly show that you can – with crisp wit and panache on a tiny, very simple open-air stage with a small tent behind as dressing room. WS Gilbert (a very rigidly minded director/writer) is probably turning somersaults in his grave but he’s been there since 1911 so don’t let’s worry about him and his died-in-the-wool followers. Not that this show takes any liberties with words – in fact there were bits of dialogue included which are usually cut, maybe for good reason. Most of Arthur Sullivan’s notes are there too, expertly accompanied by MD Richard Healey on piano with occasional percussion (drum, gong, triangle, shakers) played by the cast. Some numbers have been arranged – of which more in a moment – but that usually enhances the harmony rather than detracts from it.

The Mikado and I go back a long way. My first encounter was an Addey and Stanhope School production when I was five years old and my father was a teacher there. Since then I must have seen it 50 times as well as playing records over and over again. Never have I seen/heard The Mikado done with such clear diction – every single word whether sung or spoken is spat out with a real crystalline edge by this talented cast. For once you really can hear lines such as “her honeymoon with that buffoon” and “diminutioner” tortuously rhymed with “executioner”. It’s also a real treat to see the satire and irony – which can get lost in the joyful silliness – stressed to such effect. Edward Simpson as a Ronnie Corbett-lookalike KoKo really does squirm when trying to justify his lies to the Mikado and yes, pompous, powerful corrupt Pooh Bah is as topical as ever.

There’s some masterly doubling in this show – which becomes, in itself, part of the joke. One minute statuesque Sam Wright, about two feet taller than anyone else on stage, is intoning and hamming up his bass lines (“I was born sneering” and “I am so proud to be allowed ..” etc) and the next, still in his beard, he is cavorting hilariously in the female chorus. It’s a delightful performance. We get a lot of laughs from Simpson too who also forms part of the female chorus as a dappy girl when he’s not singing KoKo’s list song – complete with very funny topical references – or courting Katisha with Tit Willow. And Matthew James Willis excels with his camper-than-camp Nanki-Poo doubling with various female parts.

The three women in the cast are interesting too. Stephanie Lysé is fun as both Pish-Tush and the Mikado – delivering every word of the partly updated famous Mikado’s song – “My object all sublime” with real aplomb. Jenny Cullen gives us a strong Yum-Yum among other roles and Rachel Lea is a good gor-blimey Pitti-sing and an entertaining Katisha with grotesque dark curly and scarlet spectacles.

Of course one could find fault with some of this. Having a unisex cast means that some of the numbers are wrongly pitched which calls for key changes and that detracts from the weight in places. Lysé makes some quite awkward octave shifts in the Mikado’s song, for example, and in places, the falsetto singing in some of the choruses is out of tune when it isn’t meant to be. Lea doesn’t have quite the blood-red quality in her lower register which Katisha needs either.

But these are very tiny things which don’t even dent the overall quality of this highly enjoyable show which manages to be both sparkingly original and, in many ways, nicely traditional. Director Oliver Gray has done a fine job – again. I loved Illyria’s Pride and Prejudice earlier this year too. Please may we have HMS Pinafore next year?
 First published by Sardines http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Illyria%20(professional)-The%20Mikado&reviewsID=2958

Oily Car, touring

It is always a humbling privilege to be present at an Oily Cart show. The company, founded by Tim Webb and his colleagues in 1981, has long specialised in shows for very young children and young people with specific, profound and multiple disabilities. Kubla Khan – which is a masterclass in sensitive, sensory, immersive theatre – is the company’s first show for deaf/blind children.

The tour started at Linden Lodge School, “a sensory and physical college” in Wimbledon which is, in itself, as stunningly beautiful environment. Imagine, once you’ve passed the sensory play areas and scented gardens, a gentle space, a studio theatre of sorts, usually used for physical activities and drama. Today it is set up as a ship with sails and a semi-circular deck cum play station ( design by Holly Murray) at which the audience sits ready to feel the water, touch the sand and experience wind as the cast flap fans. Music is provided by Sheema Mukherjee on sitar and gong and on trombone by actor-musician Stephanie Rutherford and there’s a lot of evocative singing, often in harmony. Max Reinhardt is the musical director and co-composer.

The show accommodates a maximum of six deaf-blind participants and their carers with inclusive room for a sibling or two. Focused as it is, Oily Cart never marginalises children without disabilities and that’s a lovely touch too, The rest of us – director, Tim Webb, a couple of other observers and I along with, on the day I saw it, a four person BBC crew collecting material for both radio and TV features – sit outside the action-containing crucible and look in.

Webb is adept at using story telling in a quasi-spontaneous way. Yes, some of Coleridge’s familiar Kubla Khan words are woven into the text and songs – and, of course, the music of the poetry (“caverns measureless to man”) adds to the escapism as we set off on the famous journey. Each of the four cast members (plus stage manager Deanne Jones), dressed in cobalt blue with shiny, silly red and gold bits, focus on the individual children in the audience, allowing them to hear and see water “raining” on transparent umbrellas over their heads, feeling ice cubes on their foreheads or tasting the sweetness of the orient – and it’s all handled with warmth, vibrance and sensitivity. At the end, the whole cast sings a song for each child – whose name is included in it and that’s a stroke of genius. This Kubla Khan is much more about playing make believe together than passive watching and listening.

As so often at shows for young people with special needs there was one girl who, when it came to it, baulked at going into the playing space. In the end she sat with her carers in the doorway and took part in her own way, included as much as the cast and company staff could possibly manage. Anyone who works in this sort of theatre has to be very flexible and able to think improvisatorily on his or her feet. I often marvel – and this must be the seventh or eighth Oily Cart show I’ve seen – at how they manage to rehearse it without an audience present.

Other highlights of this profoundly moving 55 minutes of theatre include the delightful Griff Fender, an Oily Cart regular, impressively skilled at making contact with children whatever their communication issues. Stephanie Rutherford has a striking way of talking soothingly with her eyes even when she’s playing her trombone and Katherine Gray’s warm, mellifluous, resonant voice as both speaker and singer is worth travelling a long way to hear.

First published by Sardines http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Oily%20Cart%20(Professional%20productions)-Kubla%20Khan&reviewsID=2956

Adam Stadius

Last week I went to Balham – a bit of an adventure in itself because it’s an area of London I don’t know at all. My purpose was to visit Theatre N16 (yes – a bit confusing in Balham which SW12) where Adam Stadius was leading a week’s intensive training on Stanford Meisner.

This is the work of Both Feet a company which provides Meisner-based training for professional actors. I found Stadius, three days into the five day course, working with seven actors. A mixed bunch, they had trained in various schools including Mountview, East 25 and ArtsEd and some were still in full-time training. Several of them knew Stadius, who is now Head of Acting and Musical Theatre at SLP College in Leeds, from his teaching in many posts including the BRIT School.

It was a fascinating 90 minutes. Working in pairs – and swapping in and out at Stadius’s direction –  the students were working on repetition techniques which involves very concentrated focus on, and listening to, the other actor. Then there’s time for open-minded reflection on where the work has taken you in terms of you own feelings as an actor. Despite this being “only” an exercise it was powerful and dramatic to watch because the energy was so palpable. Then they moved on to a different sort of pair work in which one actor enters the room with an undisclosed purpose to find the other in some sort of distress. Again, it was surprisingly watchable because everything in Meisner training is about truthfulness and that’s the essence of convincing acting.

Steph Upsall and Adam Stadius run Both Feet because they are passionate about the Meisner technique and it speaks volumes for the effectiveness of what they do that students return repeatedly in search of top up training. And of course, it isn’t all in Balham, nice as the Theatre N16 rooms are.

http://www.both-feet.co.uk

Meisner & Musical Theatre course in Manchester (23rd & 24th of September)

 

 

If something happens to me or to someone close to me, I thirst for information. When I was pregnant with my first child I borrowed library books which detailed every stage of the nine months. When my mother was diagnosed with glaucoma (which is hereditary) it was hot foot to a medical encyclopaedia. And as for when my father got Guillaume-Barré syndrome and was months, paralysed, in Intensive Care, you can imagine how well informed I became.

Inevitably then, I have read a great deal about Alzheimer’s in recent months. Knowledge is power (sort of) and at least I can look the loathed Ms A straight in the eye if I know the awful facts. And that makes me feel a bit stronger, if nothing else.

There is, I have now noticed, some sort of news story about Alzheimer’s in the newspapers almost daily. I have collected a fat file of cuttings. Alzheimer’s research, incidentally is scandalously underfunded.

An analysis in 2012 (reported in BMJ Open in April 2015) found that from a combination of government and charitable funding only £90m was spent on Alzheimer’s research in Britain that year. £544m went to cancer research in the same period – six times as much. And this is against a background of Alzheimer’s being described as “the defining disease of the baby boomer generation” or as our consultant put it cheerfully: “Alzheimer’s is set to be the leading course of death over the next twenty years.”

A University College London study confirmed all this in July by estimating that more than 1.2 million people will have dementia by 2037 – it’s around  850,000 at present.  For years, (younger) people have been saying rather crossly that my generation is the most fortunate in history – we haven’t fought a war, we’ve bought houses whose value has escalated, we had free education and all the rest of it. Now, it seems that our luck has run out. With a vengeance.

Anyway, back to those cuttings. The point I was rambling round to is that given that Alzheimer’s research is so woefully and disproportionately underfunded there seem to be an awful lot of reports about – some interesting, some ruefully hilarious and some just statements of the bleeding obvious.

I laughed a lot, for instance, on 20 July at the Telegraph strapline “A-levels and healthy hearing cut risk of Alzheimer’s”.  “There!” I said to My Loved One over our breakfast muesli and fruit. “I always said you should have worked harder for your A-levels!” Then I read the piece. It referred to a (different) University College London study which found, among other things, that people who stayed in education beyond age 15 have an 8% less chance of developing Alzheimer’s. Grades and certificates are nothing to do with it.  Well he remained in  full-time education until he was 21 so that’s another one to cross off.

Last week a study at McGill University Canada noted that Alzheimer’s can start 20 years before the patient, or anyone else, is aware of it. And one of the earliest signs can be anosmia or loss of sense of smell.

It is at least two decades since MLO and I were driving along a country lane in Kent on summer’s day with the windows down. Then we passed a beautiful blue field of flax and I said “Oh what a wonderful smell!.” “What smell?” he asked, puzzled. I was utterly incredulous because it was an aroma of bowl-you-over strength. Then we realised that his sense of smell had pretty much gone and ever since then we’ve had to be careful about pans on the stove, toast stuck in the toaster and so on because he cannot smell burning – or anything else. I have to do the smelling for both of us, we’ve joked. Would it have helped if we’d known this was actually the top of a very nasty, slippery downward path? Probably not.

Then, only this week The Times (on its front page) announced that gum disease increases the risk of Alzheimer’s by 70%. What this boils down to is that researchers from Chung Shan Medical University in Taichung, China have established a link between poor dental hygiene and the dreaded Ms A.

Pause for a gulp of disbelief. MLO has been a mildly obsessive teeth cleaner – a three-times-a-day-with-the-brush-man – all his life. And of course he has seen a dentist regularly and, in latter years at least, rarely needed any treatment. So that’s yet another tick for the N/A box.

Over and over again, research finds that factors such as a Mediterranean diet, not being overweight, refraining from tobacco, maintaining healthy blood pressure help to prevent Alzheimer’s. Well maybe they do but it really isn’t what we want to hear at the moment.

Now, MLO is a slight man who has always weighed less than 10 stone and never been anywhere near overweight. He accepted a Woodbine in the Scouts when he was 12, hated it and has never smoked since. His blood pressure has always been fine. We both became vegetarians in the late 1970s, initially for health but also for ethical reasons. MLO has, therefore, been eating large quantities of vegetables, fruit, legumes and nuts every day for 40 years.  He’s always been a willing walker too. And he has a beer with his dinner three or four times per week and no other alcohol. What more could be possibly have done in pursuit of what these researchers  piously call “a healthy lifestyle”? More hollow laughter.

Then there are books. It was MLO himself who read a feature about Jospeh Jebelli’s book The Pursuit of Memory: the Fight Against Alzheimer’s and asked me to buy it. Jebelli is a neurobiolgist who graduated from UCL and now specialises in Alzheimer’s research at University of Washington, Seattle. His interest in the disease was triggered by watching his grandfather succumb to it.

Well, I haven’t yet been able to get my hands on this book because MLO has been struggling though it for three months. Alleyns School in the misguided 1960s taught him no science and he says he finds some of Jebelli’s explanations hard to understand. It is meant to be a mainstream book, however, so I shall reserve judgement until I’ve read it myself.

What I have read, though, is Memory’s Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia  by Gerda Saunders.  Someone on Twitter drew my attention to this and introduced Gerda to these blogs of mine.  Gerda is a South African born academic and who has lived for many years in Salt Lake City where she worked until her retirement as an academic at the University of Utah.

She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2010 just before her 61st birthday. Gerda’s book is a delightful blend of her own thoughts and experiences – often very down to earth and personal – and fascinating, intelligent reflections on the nature of memories and how we shape them. Since MLO and I have known each other since I was 14 I’m now pretty sure that many of the things we fondly remember are simply memories of memories which we’ve created together. It’s an entertaining, informative, thoughtful and brave book which helped me, a little, to understand how it really feels to have a cloudy brain as opposed to observing someone else with one.

The single truth to deduce from this plethora of reading matter? There is no justice or mercy in nature.

Gerdasaunders.com

 

Chichester Festival Theatre

Minerva theatre

Director: Richard Eyre

Githa Sowerbury’s play – which languished unperformed and forgotten for 80 years after a single performance in 1924 – is a remarkable piece. It’s a balanced, thoughtful and shocking exploration of the patriarchal sexual politics which underpin a home countries marriage – more accessible than, say, Shaw, Ibsen or Chekhov. So outrageous, by modern standards, are some of the assumptions one character expresses about women not understanding business, being unable to manage money and so on that it makes a 2017 first gasp in horror and then laugh in incredulity. And yet this is how it often was for married women after the World War One even though the Married Women’s Property Act passed 40 years earlier in 1882 was meant to protect them.

Eustace Gaydon (Will Keen) marries his late aunt’s young companion (Ophelia Lovibond) in order to get control of his aunt’s legacy. Definitely not a stereotypical stepmother, she becomes close to his children and founds a successful couturier business while he squanders the money on dubious business deals completely unknown to his wife. Integral subplots include the urgent desire of the elder daughter (Eve Posonsby) to marry the solicitor’s son (Samuel Valentine) and the stepmother’s relationship with a barrister friend (David Bark-Jones).

Will Keen is masterly (in a role which might have been written for David Haig). His character is weak and always prevaricating, trying to be calm but quickly succumbing to dangerous, almost violent, outbursts of temper. He’s in the wrong almost all the time but deep in self delusion. Keen is silky with gritted teeth one minute and red-faced and screaming the next. It’s a terrific performance.

Lovibond as the mature business woman – with her sleek 1920s bob – is almost unrecognisable from the terrified teenager initially mourning for the old lady she had cared for. She too gets a great deal of mood subtlety into a role so multifaceted and interesting that I hope this play goes mainstream and gets lots of outings because this really is a peach of a part. We see her as concerned parent, assertive business woman, poised chatelaine, loving mother – and then when everything falls apart, utterly distraught and helpless so that suddenly she seems very young again although there is hope for some sort of happier future at the end as her character re-gathers strength. Bravo.

A big tick for the stage design and costumes (Tim Hatley) too. The playing area of the Minerva is boxed behind a huge black net curtain which evokes the darkness – in every sense – of life in a 1920s house in Surrey when everything is definitely not as it seems and electric light has, at the beginning of the play, yet to be installed. And the clothes, especially the dresses worn by Lovibond and her business assistant Mrs Geddes (Kaye Brown) are stunningly elegant – in ironic contrast to what is actually happening which is anything but.

This review was first published by Sardines http://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/reviews/review.php?REVIEW-Chichester%20Festival%20Theatre%20(professional)-The%20Stepmother&reviewsID=2952