’night, Mother, Hampstead Theatre review ★★★★★

Marsha Norman’s throbbing two-hander ’night, Mother, about an elderly Southern belle trying to persuade her suicidal grown-up daughter from taking her own life, is revived at Hampstead Theatre, starring American import Stockard Channing (The West Wing, Grease) as Thelma, and British actress Rebecca Night (Fanny Hill) as Jessie.

Running as part of Hampstead Theatre’s 60th anniversary programme, 'night, Mother had its UK premiere at the theatre in 1985, after winning the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony nomination for Best Play.

Helmed by the theatre's current artistic director Roxana Silbert, this revival unboxes a complex portrait of motherhood, stretching wide the chasm between the stiff-upper-lipped silent generation and more overtly emotionally baby boomers who followed, and blaming Thelma’s refusal to acknowledge illness – mental and physical – for Jessie’s advanced depression.

Stockard Channing and Rebecca Night. Photo: Marc Brenner

The unsettling drama takes place over the course of one evening, in the kitchen of an isolated house somewhere in the deep south of the USA. Elderly widow Thelma lives alone with her grown-up daughter Jessie, and we meet the two chatting idly about manicures and topping up their sweet jars, before Jessie, cleaning her father’s gun, drops the bombshell: ‘I’m going to kill myself, Mama,’ and the narrative shifts from cosy sitcom to something far darker.

What unfolds over the rest of the intense 1h20 play is effectively an enacted suicide note, as Thelma shares with Jessie the goodbye most people don’t get with a loved one determined to take their own life. It’s deeply moving in places and agonising in others – this reviewer felt frustrated by Thelma’s inability to reason with her daughter, something we learn is a pattern between the pair. ‘Let me go easy, Mama. It’s what you’ve always done,’ says Jessie, in one of many accusations Thelma does not challenge.

Stockard Channing and Rebecca Night. Photo: Marc Brenner

As secrets are spilled, it’s painful to watch, but more so is Thelma’s perception of illness as a shameful thing to be swept under the rug. ‘You’re not really upset… You’re as normal as they come,’ she says, belittling her daughter’s poor mental health. Later, we learn of her refusal to seek help for the epilepsy which plagued the lives of both her daughter and deceased husband.

An undercurrent driving both characters’ fears – fitting for these pandemic-riddled times – is isolation. While never explicitly referenced, Jessie’s to-do list for her mother focuses largely on forging her a support network for when she's gone.

The brilliance of ’night, Mother is in Norman’s writing, and for this it's worth catching the revival. The script interweaves the domestic practicalities of running a household with the critical topic of Jessie’s suicide, and the two parallel strands of conversation criss-cross throughout. Talk of taking out the bins and making hot chocolate with marshmallows spills into Jessie’s insistence on shooting herself in deliciously unnerving fashion.

In Silbert’s production, the hot chocolate making really happens on an induction hob that forms part of designer Ti Green’s wholly naturalistic kitchen, complete with running taps, a swathe of mid-century furniture and a ladder leading up to an off-stage attic where it’s insinuated from early on that the suicide will take place.

Stockard Channing and Rebecca Night. Photo: Marc Brenner

While its subject matter is unquestionably gut-wrenching, ’night, Mother is also darkly funny thanks to a superb performance from Channing as a stoic, thick-skinned Thelma. Her poor attempts to make her daughter change her mind – pointing out suicide is a sin and making the deadpan suggestion that they rearrange the furniture instead – are among many moments that played to well-deserved laughs on press night.

Less successful is Silbert's decision for Night to play Jessie as flat and mechanical, which fits her character’s disinterest in the world and sombre resolve to leave it, but leaves you craving more heightened emotions between the pair.

’night, Mother is a warning cry for the dangers of refusing to validate poor mental health, with hints of Philip Larkin’s famous poem This Be the Verse peppered throughout. As Thelma resolves: ‘I can’t stop you because you’ve already gone,’ we realise this dysfunctional relationship between a headstrong daughter and her pushover mother is too deeply ingrained to be resolved.