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.