Conversing with Sal (Lesley Sharp) is a bit like sitting in the black leather chair under the hot studio lights of Mastermind for questions borne of curiosity but bordering on judgement are fired at you faster than the speed with which she bins her burnt to a crisp family meals.

Food is just the fuel to get you through the day, she opines; a mere starter to the more fulfilling diet of intellectual rigour and social justice which she and her fellow left-winger of a husband David (David Morrissey) encourage their three children – each named after a socialist hero – to feast upon.

Polly (Kate O’Flynn) has gone from Little Miss Clever at secondary to Little Miss Corporate at Cambridge where she studies law and later graduates from to embark on a lucrative career in the City. Carl (Sam Swainsbury) marries into money by wedding his trophy girlfriend Harriet (Zoe Boyle) whose privileged background provokes in his father a tirade against inherited wealth. And the youngest Tom (Laurie Davidson) drifts from boyfriend to boyfriend and job to job, all the while relying on the bank of mum and dad for he lacks the confidence and desire to leave home.

Spanning three decades from Tony “He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy” Blair’s rise to power to the appropriately dated May Day of Theresa Dismay’s Brexit-fuelled snap election, Jack Thorne’s three act play without interval, directed by John Tiffany with support from choreographer Steven Hoggett, is a riotous hoot in which the political shift from left to right is mirrored in Polly, Carl and to a lesser extent Tom’s shift from their parents’ altruistic principles.

Sparks fly over the dinner table as Sal’s “immense talent” for “pissing off” her children provoke a never-ending battle of one-upmanship with each member of the cast delivering their waspish one-liners with great comical timing (physical and verbal). Particularly Lesley Sharp whose “I tried Communism once” set-up is rounded off with the pitch-perfect punchline: “I ended up with two different kinds of venereal disease. No one ever washed properly.”

But there is a great deal of heart too, most notably in the third act, when in advance of a family gathering David rehearses an emotional speech about his wife’s unstinting generosity to strangers in need, perhaps to the detriment of her family. And Carl’s reflection on the gulf between his dreams and the reality of parenthood – he didn’t end up like his dad, but something “far shittier” – is truly touching.

At the start of the play, Polly yells to her mother: “What I resent is being given no choice.” In reference to having to sleep on the sofa so that the “no sex before marriage” Harriet can have her bed. And it is the narrowing of choice faced by each of Sal’s children and the differing choices they make which give her (and by extension Jack Thorne) cause for concern. Things can only get better? As those with knowledge gaps and brain freezes say on Mastermind: pass.

Peter Callaghan
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