Seeking forgotten fineries in the library, director Andy Brunskill has surfaced with ‘Black Chiffon’, a play more moth-eaten than vintage. Though it culminates touchingly, Lesley Storm’s repetitious family drama has little to commend it today.
Instead of using this tale of a well-to-do mother’s kleptomania to empathize with today’s squeezed middle, all Brunskill can do is follow Storm by suggesting that Oedipal urges lie beneath family divisions, as the nightdress stolen by Alicia (Maggie Daniels) proves identical to that worn by her son’s fiancée. Is the existence of the subconscious really still a revelation?
Things pick up towards the end, as Alicia sacrifices herself to avoid shaming her family, but this is dully metronomic in pace – a problem worsened by wistful, lingering scene-changes. Daniels finds an admirable dignity in Alicia and Charlotte Powell is refreshingly breezy as her pregnant daughter Thea, but on Mike Lees’s sepia-toned sitting-room set, ‘Black Chiffon’ is mostly bland and redundant.