ThisIsLondon.co.uk – By Nicholas de Jongh – Evening Standard 05.09.07
No more extraordinary, sexually charged or surreal encounter can ever have been played upon the Old Vic stage. It is contained within the climactic minutes of Samuel Adamson’s superb recreation of Pedro Almod?var’s film All About My Mother, an adaptation that improves upon the famous original.
At first it sounds and looks as if the melodramatics of soap opera rule, as if the heights of campery are gleefully to be scaled. Yet what a sad, poignant message underscores Almod?var’s dark comedy, dominated by love, loss and family secrets, by women banding together to withstand men who care too little and do too much damage.
Lola, Michael Shaeffer’s transvestite male, big-bosomed, in a gleaming black dress and ash-blonde wig, faces up to home truths. These have arrived in the questing form of Lesley Manville’s Manuela, who cares for his latest offspring, born to the distinctly fallen and now dead nun, Sister Rosa.