The play covers what is presumably a few weeks and culminates, inevitably, in the mother's death - but also in the daughter's discovery of hope in the form of a young lad who for once does not simply want to get into her knickers. It is on the surface a deeply grim piece of social realism. The daily routine is a monotonous one of meals, the laundrette, nursing and signing on. The daughter, a virgin, feels trapped into caring for her mother, dreams of idyllic love and finds solace with the pimply youths who feel her up on the local rec or pay her a fiver for intercourse in her room that is never achieved. They both want to escape, the mother trapped by her experiences and her debilitating condition, the daughter by the mother's dependence and by her own lack of self-esteem.
Men are either filthy exploiters or romantic heroes.
Desire for the one is tea and toast and treats, for the other storybook love and marriage. We need clear through-lines, some sort of guidance on whose side we should be on, some sort of answer, a light at the end of the tunnel, and we don't get any of this in a postmodernish lack of certainty. It could, after all, be set anywhere and in many ways is in the spirit of those mid-twentieth century novels and plays usually set in Northern towns, like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. What makes it a Welsh play is first that it is by a Welsh writer and set in a Welsh location. The converted chapel stands for Wales, with its puritan morals now redundant.