Hancock stuck in time warp

The last time Sheila Hancock was called upon to wear an eyepatch and growl was in an undistinguished British film called The Hellcats Of St Trinians in which she played a Nazi headmistress with a thing about riding crops. I'm not sure if her monocular performance in this revival of Bill McIlwraith's 1966 black comedy is significantly more subtle. And I'm not convinced that the material is, either.

The Anniversary is a drawing room comedy for the RD Laing generation - one of those Sixties plays that portrays family life as a circus of horrors. Hancock is a matriarch known to us only as "Mum", a suburban monster who opens her mouth simply to throw verbal vitriol into the faces of her children and their partners.

She threatens to inform the police that her son Henry (a sweetly loping Tony Maudsley) has a habit of slipping into stolen suspender belts. She attempts to induce a miscarriage in her prospective daughter-in-law, Shirley (Madeleine Worrall).

She traumatises her jittery son Terry (John Marquez) and his wife Karen (Rosie Cavaliero) by pretending that their children have been critically injured in a car crash. And all this on the day that they've joined her to celebrate what would have been her ruby wedding anniversary - had she not terrorised her husband into an early grave.

Hancock played Karen in the original production, and she's probably the most recognisably human figure in the play. Cavaliero charts her progress from brittle stoicism to hysteria to triumph with creditable clarity. But Mum has no comparable journey to make.

It's more of a turn than a role, more a set of vicious gags than a character. Hancock plays her as a venomous drag act, waddling about in a gold-embroidered frock, making self-conscious entrances and exits, glowering and gloating from under a carroty hairdo that looks like one of the wigs worn by Marlene Dietrich on her farewell tour.

Director Denis Lawson presents the play as a period piece. It's the right decision - these days, people don't make jokes about rape quite so easily. But his designer Robin Don bangs the point home with clanging obviousness: the setting is a nouveau-riche household in the Sixties, so of course it has a
minibar with an icebucket in the shape of a pineapple, and of course there's a print of Vladimir Tretchikoff 's Green Lady on the wall.

MacIlwraith's script is of more delicate archaeological interest. Mum's assumption that Shirley will think that a prawn cocktail is a drink would once have spoken volumes about the older woman's superior social status. Now it plays as a joke about Mum's middle-class pretensions.

Time, however, has not turned the play into a statement about the time in which it was written. It remains what I suspect that it was on its opening night in 1966: a selection box of witty insults and put-downs, a series of domestic slanging matches, and an opportunity for a star actress to deliver a performance that's too big for its own good.

The Anniversary