In 1987, plays by female writers were rare. Plays by female writers populated entirely by female characters were rarer still. This one, by Charlotte Keatley, deserves to be remembered for its vision and invention rather than gender.
That said, gender politics run right through this story of four generations of women in one family. At the elderly end is Maureen Lipman's waspish and witty Doris, a great-grandmother embittered by 60 years of marriage to a man she didn't much like. And Lipman is on cracking form.
We first encounter Doris depositing her toddler daughter Margaret (Caroline Farber) under their Manchester home's grand piano during a raid by the Luftwaffe, and then leaving her there to cope with the sound of bombs. A Lancashire lass, Doris has a redoubtable, northern, no-nonsense air about her - a quality that is water off a duck's back to the Hull-born Lipman.
But bitterness has already set in, even though it's only 1941, the earliest of the four decades in which the action is set. Imagine how she must be feeling by the 1980s, by which time her great- granddaughter Rosie (Serena Manteghi) is listening to U2 on her Walkman. By now, a whole lost property department's worth of family baggage and secrets have emerged, the most damaging of which is that Rosie thinks her grandmother Margaret is her mum, and that Jackie (Katie Brayden) - the first woman in the family to have a career instead of a life of child rearing and homemaking - is her older sister.
Keatley's targets are the conventions that have given men the lion's share of life choices, leaving women to make the biggest sacrifices. But this is no feminist polemic. Every daughter here has good reason to resent their mother. "I knew I hated you," says Rosie to Jackie after discovering that she is her mother. "I just didn't know why."
The invention of Keatley's play is that scenes are spliced together in a non-chronological mash-up. And it's in the latter eras of this family history that Lipman's performance really deepens. Doris's resentment has morphed into a kind of worldly wisdom dished out by Lipman with nanosecond accurate, comic timing that brings laughter to Paul Robinson's production where a lesser actor could have delivered something more sour. Yet that bitterness remains. It's a performance beautifully supported, particularly by Brayben as the mother haunted by the absence of her daughter, and also by a livewire Manteghi as the daughter deceived by a fake family history.
It won't be another 25 years before this play is revived