Sigrid Thornton strips away the glamour in sweeping tragicomic vision

4 hours ago 3

By Cameron Woodhead

July 5, 2025 — 2.24pm

THEATRE
Mother Play: a play in five evictions ★★★★
Southbank Theatre, until August 2

Fresh from a Broadway run featuring Jessica Lange, the Australian premiere of Paula Vogel’s three-hander Mother Play stars Sigrid Thornton as the latest mother with queer children to haunt the canon of American drama.

Yael Stone and Ash Flanders (rear) with Sigrid Thornton in Mother Play.

Phyllis Herman is a real piece of work. A chain-smoking, immaculately coiffed glamour-puss abandoned by her husband, she’s been left to raise two kids alone in Washington, DC, in the 1960s.

As young Carl (Ash Flanders) and Martha (Yael Stone) dutifully unpack boxes in their down-at-heel rental apartment, Phyllis reclines in fur coat and sunglasses, as if looking like a movie star can somehow magic away the bitterness of life below the poverty line.

Phyllis’s situation – and the aspect of her character that’s obsessively bound up in her physical attractiveness – might remind you of the smothering Amanda Wingfield from Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, though this work melds the claustrophobia and emotional brutality of domestic drama with a sweeping tragicomic vision that spans decades and delivers us swords drawn onto the social battlefield covered by Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.

Thornton isn’t afraid to be unsympathetic. Phyllis is a victim, an unwilling mother who reluctantly chose giving birth over the risks of a backyard abortion, but Thornton doesn’t hold back on the cruelties inflicted on her children. Parentification (parent-child role reversal), binge-drinking, psychological and emotional abuse, and deeply ingrained bigotry will blight the childhoods of Carl and Martha, whose bond with each other deepens as they make their escape.

Sigrid Thornton and Yael Stone in Mother Play. Thornton’s character, Phyllis, may be cruel but she is also a victim.

The foreshadowing of their queerness is about as subtle as a drag queen’s make-up, yet Flanders and Stone bring vitality and aching nuance to siblings compelled to discover what real love feels like in the absence of a healthy example of it. Flanders’ gift for camp comedy can make the audience cheer or howl with laughter. As the narrator figure in this memory play, Stone’s depth of feeling and implacable quest for emotional truth carve out a sharp elegiac frame.

Both actors sketch the maturation of their characters in the face of maternal betrayal with grace and nimble economy.

Phyllis, though, cannot or will not change, and the show’s starkest dramatic contrast lies between premature death faced with stoicism and style, and the living death of Phyllis’ loneliness. Perhaps Thornton’s finest moment comes when she strips the glamour away to deliver a wordless tragic vision of a woman growing older, estranged from her adult children, still performing even when she’s alone.

Director Lee Lewis draws out performances that complete each other, and the production design leavens and complicates the drama, time-travelling through decades from a ’70s gay disco to a hyper-real dementia ward. There’s even an over-the-top homage to cockroaches – a fun flourish in a play that dwells on the thanklessness of mothering, and ends with a quiet assertion of the value, independent of gratitude or reward – of caring for another human being.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.