Kitchen sink dramas used to be working-class; they are now middle-class. Who knows best how to bring up a child? I think it was Jonathan Swift who said that parents were the very last people to be entrusted with the bringing up of children. Nancy Harris’s well acted psychological drama opens with an 8-year-old boy intending to cut off his ear. His father, a plastic surgeon, is constantly abroad in some war zone or disaster area, tending the wounded. His mother, a one-time high flying lawyer, is heavily pregnant with her second child, and unable to cope with her son’s bad behaviour at home and at school. She has tried to appease him with a pet of his choice – a tarantula! Father, meanwhile, has engaged a professional Irish nanny to help her without bothering to tell her.
Mixing careers and parenthood is never easy and events get pretty traumatic with three people at loggerheads as to how to deal with the troubled boy. Kate Fleetwood is excellent as the mother, at breaking point, worried about her lack of maternal feelings. The father (Mark Bazeley) is so awful, such a hypocrite, such a liar, and so patronising that the audience roars with laughter at his gross insensitivity and sides with the mother and longs for her to show the devious and intruding nanny (Denise Gough) the door.