APOLOGIA Trafalgar Studios

American actor Stockard Channing makes a welcome return to London in Alexei Kaye Campbell’s Apologia, playing a Marxist art historian and absent mother, who was active politically in the 1960’s. Her two sons arrive to celebrate her birthday and the publication of her memoir in which they are not even mentioned. Channing has always been dextrous with waspish dialogue and here she is provided with a cornucopia of rude put-downs. Joseph Millson is very good, too – so good that I did not even realize that he had played both sons until the curtain calls.