ACCORDING to this chirpy salute to the mothering classes, one of many, many things that worries bright women who have children is that they will become boring as well as bored. And I’m afraid that the inadvertent evidence of Mum’s the Word is that, yes, they sometimes do. Or is that just the spoiled reaction of a category of person who comes out of the evening rather badly, namely the male and particularly the husband? Possibly. The show was put together by six Vancouver actresses who took time out to tend their biological clocks, and, if the Albery programme is to be believed, it has sold out in Montreal, been seen by half of Australia, and set records in Glasgow. Clearly, their capsule portrait of exhaustion, ennui, love and fulfilment has touched nerves, chords, hearts, conceivably even heads. And there’s no reason to suppose there aren’t lots of rueful mums and remorseful dads in and around London, too.

Babies on tiny clouds hover above a bloated Wendy house occupied by six nursery chairs and six women. That fine actress Imogen Stubbs starts the evening by miming birth in all its athletic grotesquerie.

The front stalls get squirted with breast milk. And performer after performer delivers a memory, an anecdote, a piece of business. Jenny Eclair, her wig adding to the impression of a manic Goldilocks or barmy Heidi, plays the weirdest; Patsy Palmer the most streetwise; Cathy Tyson the most touching.

It’s she who offers the nearest to a continuing narrative, the tale of a boy who was born hugely prematurely and, despite setbacks galore, was gradually nursed into normal life. But the seriousness of this only emphasises how relatively ordinary almost everything else is.

Here’s a world where clever women get splattered with ordure, are patronised by idle husbands, exchange gibberish with their tots, endure snide remarks from fellow-mothers (“He’s still in nappies at four, how cute!”) and never seem to have time to sleep, think or be alone.

What’s apparently worst yet best is that they get addicted to the whole crazy business. According to Stubbs, who has spent the first part of the evening with her hair in wild disarray and the buttons on her cardie stuck in the wrong holes: “I’m becoming dependent on being dependent and what I fear most is resignation.” A mainly female first-night audience kept squealing its assent. I just squealed internally, giving thanks that my gender means I have missed out on one of life’s wondrous experiences.

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