Girl (Patsy Ferran) addresses the audience directly, sashaying and shimmying around the stage like an antsy teenager as she relates her early childhood, growing up with six siblings.
But the mother in question changed from being a “good mum” who would make her daughter poached eggs on toast whenever she asked to a brainwashed alien who ran off with a Canadian referred to as The Moron.
The fact that much of the story is based on Warden’s own mother is desperately affecting, even if she admits that it’s an unreliable version of a true story.
The set is an aqua–coloured teenage girl’s room with fairy lights and cut–out magazine pictures.
Her musical soundtrack is influenced by her brothers and sisters, most of whom are half–siblings, and the sequence when she pulls down a wall chart to explain her complicated family tree is hysterical.
Then her mother leaves her in Britain to live in Canada and the effect on her 12-year-old heart is truly moving.
The tone of bewilderment and hurt curdles into anger and an enforced self–sufficiency.
Ferran is mercurial in the part, acting tough and cool one moment, slumped in pain and loss the next and sustaining a remarkable intimacy with the audience throughout. And her epiphany when she eats a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup for the first time is worth the price of admission alone.