Somewhere in the middle of My Mother Said I Never Should, the mother, Margaret, turns to her daughter, Jackie, and says : ”I wanted you to do better than I did.” A key comment to the relationship between mothers and daughters in Charlotte Keatley’s play, which traces the emancipation of women through four generations in the same family from Edwardian times to the 1980s.

Through a kaleidoscope of short scenes, sharp one-liners, real time and flashbacks to childhood, the personalities and predictive destinies of the four are sketched in such a way, the bigger picture, when it comes together in the second act, is populated by people the audience can relate to and care about.

This is a play about women, about establishing a sense of self-worth without being feminist.

When first premiered in 1987, it must have been ground-breaking in both content and presentation and the then director, Brigid Larmour, now in charge of Watford Palace Theatre, must be congratulated on a revival which still touches a nerve and involves a modern audience.

Her choice of cast could not have been better. Eve Pearce’s Doris, wartime mother and “with-it” great-grandmother is superb. Abigail Thaw pulls at the heart-strings as the woman in the middle, torn between the values of a conventional wife and mother and work, who “adopts” her hippie daughter, Jackie, Claire Brown’s illegitimate daughter, Rosie (Katherine Manner), to give the young mother the chance to study and develop a career.

This family “secret” is pivotal but kept nicely in proportion to real life and its untimely disclosure used to illustrate the ultimate emancipation of the youngest bud on the female family tree, Rosie, who moves on to the tune of her own rules, encouraged by her great-grandmother.

The play peaked at the point where young Rosie finally succeeds in solving great-grandmother’s game of Solitaire in a symbolic celebration of independence.

Grelle White

Continues until October 17