MOTHER ADAM Jermyn Street Theatre

Charles Dyer’s comedy, which was last seen in 1973, is an oddity. There are just two characters at war with each other: a bed-ridden, crippled old mother, a former missionary, and her unmarried middle-aged son, a museum curator. Her son wants to know who his dad was and the answer could be in a sea-chest which he is not allowed to open. Linda Marlowe and Jasper Britton are impressive; but Dyer’s ornate dialogue, which is the piece’s special characteristic, is so eccentric and so surreal and so much of a literary mouthful as to become tiresome. It might have been a better commercial bet to have revived Dyer’s Staircase.