WAVING
White Bear Theatre
★★★★★
“Such a hard-hitting script is well-served by minimalism”
Waving tells the story of an artist mother descending into Alzheimer’s, surrounded by her two adult children, each coping in their own way.
The mother has no name. In the programme she is called only The Artist. That tells you what kind of household Rosalind Philp has written. This woman is so completely identified with her gift that her children never quite became people to her. They never quite launch.
Philp’s play, presented by Dogs in Wellies, puts a celebrated painter in a coastal studio, starting a final portrait while Alzheimer’s takes everything. Ava de Winter plays The Artist and co-devised Waving with Philp. De Winter finds the hard note in the part. It is not the confusion, but the intermittent brilliance. Her old self surfaces to land a joke and to dominate the room with charm. Then she is gone again. Each return is smaller than the last.
This pattern is repeated within the family as rare flashes of genuine warmth. Moments of supportiveness are blink-and-you-miss-it between long stretches of mutual resentment.
The Artist’s two adult children slug it out for breadcrumbs of what passes for maternal love. Philp plays Lena, the daughter who keeps bouncing back. Her own life was never allowed to succeed. She is now expected to manage her mother’s inexorable decline. The performance is built from suppression behind a girl-guide smile. A child in that house who declined to make her mother the centre of everything would have paid for it. So, Lena learned to layer her profound hurt with people-pleasing. She’s learned to measure her self-worth by what others will pay attention to and that’s cost her any hope in adult relationships.
Ben Levy’s Miles took another escape route from the same dilemma: drugs and gay-for-pay parties, while the woman he yearns for escapes him. Levy gives Miles a brittle charm that makes the self-destruction look sociable. That is much harder to watch than misery.
Paul Stone is Fabian, the camp neighbour, played with great aplomb. He is Miles’ customer. The mother, trying to sell some paintings, wishes he was hers.
Paul Cooke co-directs with Philp. The production is ultra-low budget. There are an easel and a little furniture. Lighting and sound (Mig Dulevicius and Ron Dixon) do the work of a whole coastline and the crowd at an art show opening. Judicious snippets of Dan Gorgas’ music, ‘So Long Baby’ are unobtrusively scattered throughout. Such a hard-hitting script is well-served by minimalism.
Grief for a parent cannot be separated from grievance. The play provides no consolation in its exploration of how many decades people spend in the bubble of familial misery because it’s the only way they know how to live. If they’re lucky, there are moments of escape, inevitably wasted recreating the same dynamic in their adult relationships, only to fail and return to the mothership. So, the play reminds us that all we have is time. And time is short. On almost no money, Dogs in Wellies have made fifty minutes that hurt in the right places.
WAVING
White Bear Theatre
Reviewed on 29th July 2026
by Elizabeth Botsford
Photography by Ron Dixon
