"The London Classic Theatre Company, established in 1993, is in only its first year as a touring company. Its aim is to bring challenging drama to audiences around the country, and last week it gave audiences at the Old Fire Station, Oxford, an opportunity to revisit Charlotte Keatley’s important 1987 play, My Mother Said I Never Should.

As the action of the drama progresses, four women, representing four generations of the same family, reveal more and more of their emotional lives across the broad sweep of the 20th century.

At one level, the play is a fascinating social document, as the author brilliantly captures sufficient characteristic detail to evoke past decades, from the utility crockery of wartime to the fashion statements of 1980s punk.

Equally, though, it provides an insight into the attempts of successive generations of parents to offer their children more opportunities than they had themselves, generally with unsatisfactory consequences.

And in amongst all this, Keatley inserts scenes in which, in defiance of temporal logic, all four women meet and play together as children, their emerging personalities already giving some hint of what lies ahead for them.

The most senior generation is represented by Doris (Grace Mitchell), an indomitable Lancastrian, who appears first as an undemonstrative and rather prim mother to her only daughter Margaret (Pauline Whitaker), but ends up as the loving, with-it gran that most of us would wish to have or be ourselves. We eventually discover that she never really liked her husband Jack, who is heard only through the sound of a distant lawnmower, although it seems to be from Jack that successive generations derive the artistic talent which gives them the chance to make something of themselves.

While Margaret lacks the character and insights of her mother, her daughter Jackie (Marianne O’Connor) and Jackie’s illegitimate child Rosie (Paula Jennings) are bursting with life and move furthest away from their Mancunian origins.

Miss Jennings, who has the advantage of playing the only character who is still little more than a child when the play ends, is perhaps the most successful in portraying the emotional ups and downs of childhood and, seen through her eyes, the future looks relatively bright, despite the baggage of her family’s past. Under the direction of Michael Cabot, My Mother Said I Never Should is a first-class production, with talented cast, which should play to capacity audiences in the months to come."