This play is perfectly built for popular consumption - three generations of women deal with aging, life, their relationships with one another and the inevitability of death. It's material that is all-too-relatable to people of any age, looking right down the barrell at our mortality and examining it with honesty, wit and compassion. Andrea James stages it with verve and style, using the tiny Griffin stage and her three actresses to take us from fasionable bar to suburban home to 5pm discount dinner special - with two of the three women also getting a chance to switch into alternate roles for substantial cameos.
Belinda Giblin plays the oldest, Grace, blunt in her aggravation with the frustrations of age and with her daughter, but still with compassion for her daughter and granddaughter. Jillian O'Dowd as the one in the middle, both mother and daughter, finding herself caught in the role of caregiver in two directions, is compelling as she attempts to put a sunny face on as much as possible while clearly deeply uncomfortable with the directions some of the conversations are going. Amy Hack as granddaughter Suzie lends a junior perspective, being slightly peterbed by the ways her elders act (and in a role that feels slightly under-written - she's basically limited to responding to the other two rather than really having an arc of her own).
Isabel Gordon's set isn't one of the best Griffin sets, largely because it feels like it wants to be in a prosecnium space facing the audience straight on, rather than the usual Stables corner - though the chintzy decoration gives it a nice surburban homely vibe.
This is surprisingly light material for the normally more sober-sided Griffin, and gleefully so - it could be accused of perhaps being a little slight and outside Griffin's remit of providing new directions for Australian theatre (rather than familiar crowd-pleasers) but it's still a worthwhile exercise.
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