There is no escaping the sensation that Phyllis Herman, the matriarch of Paula Vogel’s Mother Play: A play in five evictions, is a woman we have met before. Her familiarity can be traced, through the work of American playwrights such as Tracy Letts and Jon Robin Baitz, all the way back to Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Even Edward Albee’s ferocious ‘mother’ Martha who, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), feigns she has a college-age son, might recognise something of herself in Vogel’s creation.

With a focus on memory, one which echoes both Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944) and O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), Mother Play (nominated for Best Play at the 2024 Tony Awards) is essentially a series of vignettes – sometimes comic, sometimes tragic – that map one American family’s volatile trajectory through life and death.

We first meet the Hermans – Phyllis (Sigrid Thornton), Carl (Ash Flanders), and Martha (Yael Stone) – in 1964. Abandoned by her husband, Phyllis (mid-thirties) has just moved herself and her children into a basement apartment; although, truth be told, it is the children (Carl, fourteen; Martha, twelve) who manage the move, making sure everything, even Phyllis, gin in one hand, cigarette in the other, finds its place in the new apartment.

Yael Stone as Martha Herman, Sigrid Thornton as Phyllis Herman and Ash Flanders as Carl Herman (courtesy of Melbourne Theatre Company)

Over the years – and from one relocation to the next – the family are torn apart and patched back together, repairs that never quite restore the attachment that is, even in the play’s first scenes, tenuous: Phyllis eating dinner at a bar rather than coming home to the meals Martha keeps warm; Carl and Martha keeping secret that Martha is being bullied; Martha adopting a ‘butch’ way of walking rather than sashaying in the ladylike way her mother prescribes; Carl urging Martha to get herself an education so she can escape their mother; Carl’s implicit demands for attention and Phyllis’s endless demands for gin.

Heavily autobiographical, Mother Play exposes Vogel’s anguish at the death of her own brother, a relationship she explored in her 1992 play, The Baltimore Waltz. (The funeral instructions Carl writes in Mother Play are taken word-for-word from the instructions of Vogel’s brother.) As a writer, Vogel is interested in negative empathy, and she uses Mother Play to unpack her own emotions, channelling years of anger and frustration through Martha.

While Vogel has found a neat structure for Mother Play, the text is peppered with elisions of plot and narrative, as well as several precipitous shifts in tone (the scene where Phyllis and Carl are reunited in a disco one flagrant example). Nevertheless, director Lee Lewis manages to bring flesh and blood to a play that is, on paper, little more than bone. The overall effect is both thoughtful and moving. And fun. Lewis and her design team (lighting designer, Niklas Pajanti; audio-visual designer, Nevin Howell) make the most of the ‘magic realism’ suggested in Vogel’s stage directions, notably a troupe of dancing cockroaches, inescapable infestations of memory that are carried from one apartment to the next; creatures that are both stomach-turning and strangely joyful.

As Phyllis, Sigrid Thornton is a revelation, credibly manoeuvring Phyllis from joy to devotion to rancour. She imbues Phyllis with traces of gentility and romance, conveying something of who Phyllis might have been, before the encumbrances of marriage and children. Thornton resists turning Phyllis into a caricature, rendering her instead as both emotional assailant and victim, her vulnerability always quivering under the surface of her indignation. This is particularly evident in Phyllis’s final years, as well as in the extraordinary ‘ballet’ where we watch Phyllis, now living alone, silently rehearsing her daily routine (the power of the scene enhanced by Kelly Ryall’s sympathetic composition and sound design).

Ash Flanders gives a fabulous rendition of Carl as a precocious and entitled little prince; a boy-man too clever for his own good and ever-ready to disparage any pretensions of class to which his mother clings. Carl is adored and indulged, allowed to lay about with his nose in a book, while Martha cooks and learns to type. The tragedy is that Carl is never going to love either his mother or his sister more than he loves himself. In this, what Vogel’s play reminds us of are not only the expectations on daughters to ‘mother’, but also the socially sanctioned selfishness of sons. (It is impossible to imagine a version of The Glass Menagerie where Tom Wingfield ends up bathing and caring for his demented mother.)

Given that Martha is largely an avatar for Vogel herself, it is ironic that Martha lacks much of the definition afforded to the other characters, a situation that places Yael Stone at something of a disadvantage. As wellspring of the memories the play encompasses, Martha is largely subsumed in observing, placating, and answering to the other two, a part she will continue to play, barely acknowledged, until her mother’s last breath. Even given the limitations on Vogel’s characterisation of Martha, Stone doesn’t manage to unleash the level of turmoil that might be expected when dark emotions are allowed, no matter how briefly, to scurry about in the light. Stone does, however, bring a begrudging tenderness to Martha’s final scenes with her mother, one that cements Martha’s role as the true mother in the play.

As Vogel herself notes, what distinguishes Mother Play from its theatrical forebears is that it is not a ‘son’ evoking the mother-figure, but rather a daughter, and it is telling that, before she can tend to her ailing mother, Martha must first seal away the memories she has so recently unpacked. Martha’s observation in the opening moments of the play (as she unseals the one box of artefacts Carl left behind after his death) that ‘there is a season for packing. And a season for unpacking’ alludes both to Ecclesiastes and American folk singer Pete Seeger’s ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ – ‘a time to be born, a time to die … a time to laugh, a time to weep’ – and foreshadows the play’s exploration of the vicissitudes of time. What Vogel’s shift from a son’s memories to a daughter’s keenly underlines is the differential load women are made to bear in navigating these vicissitudes; the degree to which they must pack away both their ambitions and their anger to fulfil a duty to ‘mother’, whether the focus of that mothering is child, sibling, or parent.

Motherhood is, Vogel insinuates in Mother Play, both play and performance. There are fun and games aplenty in Martha’s recollections of her family, but also, crucially, an appreciation of the extent to which motherhood is a role women are made to play, one which they approach with varying degrees of enthusiasm, ambivalence, bitterness, and dread.

Mother Play: A play in five evictions (Melbourne Theatre Company) continues at the Southbank Theatre until 2 August 2025. Performance attended: 4 July.