With Dawn French and Alison Moyet headlining this three-hander, I had high expectations of a grand evening out at the theatre.

And on opening night the audience response was indeed ecstatic, with much laughter throughout, tremendous applause at the end and even something of a standing ovation. But I am not so sure about it.

The premise is good a widowed, disabled mum, Maureen (June Watson), is trapped in the four walls of her bungalow.

Dawn French is daughter Bernice, a career teacher who has sacrificed her own social life for 25 years of caring for her mother every evening and every weekend.

Bernice's life after work consists of lifting her mother from armchair to wheelchair, from wheelchair to lavatory and to bed.

She has to constantly deal with her mother's demand for news from the staffroom and the trivial details of the world Maureen can see from behind her net curtains. Bernice is tired and trapped.

Across in Spain, daughter Cath (Alison Moyet) makes a precarious living singing in bars, having affairs with unsuitable men and looking for her big showbusiness break.

At home, resentment and anger is building but writer Carmel Morgan, whose first stage play this is, plays the situation mainly for laughs with some good one-liners.

But Morgan really fails to show the pain and rage of the situation, turning what could be a splendid tragi-comedy into just another sitcom.

Dawn French's attempt to evoke sympathy for her character is quickly bogged down in a flood of these one-liners, which also rely far too frequently on the use of the F word to get laughs.

And while Alison Moyet sings some good new songs, her character is better defined by her mother and sister than by her own appearances on stage.

The songs add little to the drama.

Smaller lacks the intense anger and bitterness the situation demands. Morgan may have good TV credits, including Coronation Street and Shameless, but she needs to understand the different nature of writing for the stage, where you need bigger characters to move an audience.

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