Funny but frustrating teenage angst

My Mum’s a Twat Royal Court

If you had a mum like the one in Anoushka Warden’s very funny new monologue, you might want to call her a twat, too. When its unnamed narrator was nine, her mum joined a healing cult. Three years later, the mother left England with her new boyfriend, known here as the “moron”, to set up a new healing centre in Canada.

The abandoned daughter, who moved in with her dad, visited during the holidays, where one Christmas was memorably spent without speaking – her mum had taken a vow of silence for four days.

For her 18th birthday, her mum sent her three gold painted shells. Later, the daughter discovers that her mother has in fact been back to England several times – but to visit the cult’s headquarters in Somerset, not her. So you can forgive the provocative crudeness of the play’s title: its very bluntness serves as a signpost to a clumsy teenage landscape of broiling resentment and hurt.

Warden is the much-liked head of press at the Royal Court, and whatever the actual circumstances of this commission, her debut has to combat suspicions that her position was a useful tool in getting it staged. The loosely autobiographical monologue, which quivers with strident comic energy, almost but perhaps not fully banishes these suspicions.

It helps tremendously that it’s performed by that eminently watchable rising star Patsy Ferran who, in Vicky Featherstone’s light-footed production, mixes a febrile conspiratorial air with a powerful sense of the defiant carapace worn by the daughter to mask her pain. She captures too the narrator’s rebellious streak, sardonic humour and quirky eccentricities – on her bedroom wall, there is a poster not of River Phoenix but David Jason from Only Fools and Horses.

Yet in many respects the narrator is a typical teenage girl who goes off the rails in very typical ways. In Canada, she gets into gangsta rap, drugs and underage sex. Her emotional vocabulary is similarly generic. She feels “angry” and “upset”. Her mum’s obsession with healing is “a joke”. After a while, Ferran’s performance starts to reflect the limitations of her material. There’s a sense of wings being clipped.

Warden’s monologue is beautifully marinated in Eighties pop-culture references but it also feels undercooked. She might have claimed the right to tell her story on her own terms, but, as a piece of drama, you yearn to hear the mother’s side. You feel there is a whole other play beneath the surface waiting to be explored. That, in its way, is a compliment.

Until Jan 20. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com