It is a rite of passage for all children that for some time they will be mortifyingly embarrassed by their mothers.
When you have a mother as extreme as Jonathan Maitland’s, that otherwise transient period lasts a lifetime, or certainly long enough for some kind of grudging tolerance to set in, and when the child has progeny of their own, it is inevitable that they will reflect on their own upbringing. You have to forgive the former generation before you can guide the next.
Maitland’s mother, however, was more than just embarrassing, although she was that as well. She is portrayed as unscrupulous, shameless, erratic, neglectful, autocratic and rude. No wonder Maitland’s How to Survive Your Mother is a comedy. If it was a drama, no one would believe a word of it.
Even in this form, it is difficult to know which parts of the play are authentic. He says, “the big stuff is genuine,” but the smallest acts and omissions can scar the most, and he's written it for laughs, not to explore the relationships. Perhaps it doesn’t matter; everyone has had a mother so each person will have their own experiences against which to calibrate the events in Maitland’s play.
By any measure, she was a piece of work. She packed off her children (conflated into one child, Jonathan, in the play) to boarding school at a painfully young age to be fat-shamed and flogged and forgot to pick them up at the end of term. Her second husband was a private investigator, instrumental in her divorce from the first. She ran an old people’s home, which she later converted into Cheam’s first gay hotel.
And that is by no means all—there is a catalogue of misdeeds and misdemeanours that rather delightfully beggars belief, and it all plays out to a great musical backdrop of hits from the period.
As camouflage for being Jewish, she pretended to be half-Spanish and half-French, as if that continentally colourful, sexy and passionate mix would excuse her outrageous behaviour in the beige Surrey of the 1960s and '70s.
In a wonderful performance from Emma Davies, a glamorous, leopard-printed vamp, Bru, as she was known, has an irresistible charm. There are hints of a dark place that drives her self-bestowed right to trample underfoot where and when she pleases mixed with an entitlement to enjoy a wonderfully uncensored freedom.
Orbiting this dangerous planet in strong support over a range of characters are John Wark and Stephen Ventura, with Brodie Edwards and Howard Webb alternating as the young boy and Peter Clements moving as an older Son, meeting the point where Maitland (bizarrely the least convincingly) plays his current older self whom he paints as a bit of an arse.
Maitland the writer doesn’t hazard much of a diagnosis which Bru would surely have were she alive and kicking out teeth today, and neither does he compromise the comedy, finding the funny side of the successive horrors until the narrative arc requires him not to.
There is a sense that this is a dramatised collection of the best anecdotes. There is a composite feel to this portrait of a person, a representation in mosaic, where you make of the gaps what you will or just take in the whole.
Bru was sometimes a monster, sometimes a huge amount of fun to be around—always a force to be reckoned with. Like all parents, for good or ill, she left an indelible mark on the next generation.