I call my mother once a week to tell her what I’m up to and she answers whilst she makes casseroles, takes a break from her emails, and unloads the dishwasher. She asks me how work is going and I ask her the same. She tells me that when she was young she wanted to have ten children whereas I have found it hard to sell myself on one. I often wonder, like most young women do, how much my life will come to resemble hers.

Gabriella Shennan’s revival of the 1987 play My Mother Said I Never Should follows the relationships between four women of different generations as they grow, marry, have children, work, argue, laugh. It is at times serious and at others saccharine, but it never loses sight of the complexity of the women at its forefront and the family ties that bring them together and, sometimes, threaten to tear them apart.

“It never loses sight of the complexity of the women”

I tell my mother I think her grey hair suits her. ‘Of course you think that. It suits the role I play in your life.’ There is an instinct within us all to simplify the roles others play in our lives, especially our parents — it’s hard to imagine that your mother, like you, was once young and unknowing, and based on its synopsis I worried going into the show that the generational differences might prevent the characters from being fully realised. These were unfounded. The play’s commitment to preserving the personalities of its characters is evident even in the costuming. No physical change makes clear the characters’ ages, which gives them all a timelessness and ensures the focus is on these women as individuals rather than the archetypal roles they play.

No character is sidelined into roles of ‘housewife’ or ‘grandmother’. Instead, each woman’s desires, ambitions, and prejudices have a central role. For example, Margaret (Olivia Khattar) goes from a wartime child to a young woman to a grandmother. Though it is always obvious what stage of her life she is in, Khattar preserves Margaret’s unique individuality masterfully through subtleties of behaviour that remain consistent throughout her thoughtful performance.

Vignettes reveal changing dynamics: the strict mother becomes the doting grandmother; the rebellious daughter becomes the responsible career woman. The characters sometimes feel tropey — we see the career focused woman too busy for family, the doddery old woman interested mainly in her garden, the politically idealistic teenage girl. But these tropes have a basis in reality, and My Mother Said I Never Should looks beyond the superficiality of these generational stereotypes in a way that will truly resonate with its audience.

There is intergenerational tension in the play, like there is in every family. Jackie’s (Arabella Alhaddad) mother resents that she puts her career ahead of raising children. Though the prospect of divorce horrifies her daughter, Doris (Liliian Jones) wishes this had been an option for her generation. The political commentary of My Mother Said I Never Should is nothing radical but it explores these topics with delicacy without ever becoming didactic. Never does a broader political message, which would be easy to have given the subject matter, take precedent over the personal justifications of its characters, which makes them feel all the more human.

These serious scenes delicately toe the line between lighthearted generational comedy and concerns that will strike a deeply personal chord for many women in the audience. Interspersed between them are scenes of the ensemble cast as children, playing make-believe, convening with the dead, casting spells. It is hard to play a child, and these sections are where the otherwise strong performances are weakest — the actors become almost shrill when emulating childish lack of restraint.

These childhood moments seem uniquely personal to what little girls get up to, left to their own devices. In these scenes, with the ages of the cast equalised, we are invited to consider how we might relate to the women in our lives, our mothers and grandmothers, if we were not so separated by time. My Mother Said I Never Should will likely be a deeply personal show to many audiences — you’ll probably want to call your mum afterward.

My Mother Said I Never Should is showing at the Corpus Playrooms, Tuesday 7th to Saturday 11th February, 7pm