Review: Thinking of You, Laughing Horse @ the Phoenix (Venue 146)

There’s something about the staging of this play – a dysfunctional family drama which appears to become a portrait of a disintegrating mind – that renders it dense and confusing. **

At first it’s played straight, a convincing if not compelling kitchen-sink tableau, with mother and father separated by his desertion to the Continent on the pretext of work and the mother’s increasingly frantic oddness. She makes off-colour remarks about Oedipus to her disturbed son (“we don’t get the same jokes,” he tells her later, a sharp summation of the typical parent/teenager relationship), while the relatively normal daughter takes on greater significance as the narrative fragments.

It’s well written but, perhaps, somewhat overambitious.

Until 26 August. Today 4:30pm.