Midnight Your Time, Assembly Rooms - review

Webcam mission: Diana Quick as Judy, trying to contact her daughter in Palestine
10 April 2012

It's a niche but potent theatre-going demographic - especially in terms of ticket-buying capacity - to which this one-woman show is most likely to appeal: parents of twentysomething graduates convinced their offspring are throwing away all those precious years of expensive education.

Diana Quick plays Judy, an Islington lawyer "squeezed out" of her job and thus with excess time on her keyboard hands to leave webcam messages for her increasingly hard-to-track-down daughter who is engaged in voluntary work in Palestine.

Quick, seated at a computer and with her face magnified onto a big screen, gives a poignant portrayal of an empty nester who can't help but break her weekly promises not to interfere in her daughter's life. Writer Adam Brace could usefully have dug a little deeper all round, including into the family's recent bust-up when they gathered for Christmas, but he neatly skewers a certain kind of London liberal sensibility that is all for doing good works as long as they further your career at the same time. Judy, it transpires, is furious to find that she has been "gazumped" by neighbours when it comes to inviting the latest Afghan refugee to dinner. Unassuming yet agreeable.

Until Aug 28 (0131 623 3030, assemblyfestival.com).

Midnight Your Time
Assembly Rooms

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