All About My Mother Old Vic, SE1

Devoted fans of All About Eve, the classic Bette Davis drama about feminine rivalry and backstage treachery – and, trust me, there are those who can recite every line of dialogue – will surely find themselves squealing with delight at the nifty allusions to their beloved movie that feature in Samuel Adamson’s stage version of what many consider Pedro Almodovar’s best film, All About My Mother, his 1999 hit about mothers, women and the drag queens who love them.

Arriving out of the blue to become an indispensable assistant to Huma Rogo (Diana Rigg), an ageing theatre diva who is touring as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Manuela (Lesley Manville), a mother lost in grief after the death of Esteban, her 17-year-old son, takes to the stage when Huma’s co-star and lesbian lover is floored by her drug habit. She more than cuts it as a replacement – but then, as she reveals, she knows the part inside out, having played it long ago as a sometime actress opposite her dead son’s long-disappeared father – who, it finally turns out, is a transvestite junkie who has since impregnated a young nun and infected her with HIV.

Confused? If you haven’t seen the screen version, it may seem as though you would be (although most of the audience when I saw the play certainly seemed to know what was coming). Manuela’s moment in the spotlight is, it transpires, just one small thread in a rich tale of coincidences, random friendships and interlinked situations, all of which finally coalesce around one theme – the importance of family, in whatever shape it comes. So, fans of Bette shouldn’t expect to see any Eve Harrington-style backstabbing: this is all about sisterhood, loyalty and finding a way through whatever life throws at you.

The sensibility may be modern, but it’s the old movies, such as Eve and Streetcar, that provide the backdrop, as well as the aesthetic, which is sometimes overblown, occasionally dragged up to the nines, but always possessed of a finely tuned instinct for melodrama. Within the space of a couple of hours, we get two deaths, a wrist-slitting, a funeral and numerous hospital scenes, not to mention a moment in a rainy street and a back projection of crashing waves. There is enough incident and dramatic potential packed in here to power five plays, so it’s a tribute to Almodovar’s original writing and Adamson’s straightforward adaptation, not to mention Tom Cairns’s crisp and clear-sighted direction, that the narrative never falters.

That said, whether or not you decide to go along with the contrivances that are undoubtedly necessary to keep all of the strands in place depends on how far you are willing to enter Almodovar’s particular world of strong women, absent straight men and throw-away camp humour. On paper, at least, I should be the very essence of a fan: enough of a movie-lover to get the references, gay and city-dwelling, with easy access to art-house cinemas. The fact that I have never taken to it is based on a sense that the trumpeted gay communion with women, of which Almodovar is an exemplar, is based on a view of them as being at their best when endlessly resourceful while suffering, along with a love of a certain kind of souped-up, cartoonish glamour with which most women have little in common. You can admire and enjoy the characters, yet remain, for the most part, unmoved by them.

Thank goodness, then, for Lesley Manville, who, being at the centre of the play as a kind of mother bountiful – she takes maternal responsibility for the dying nun and a newborn baby – manages to inject realism, a recognisable ordinariness and true warmth into a milieu where there would otherwise be little. Her outburst of grief when her son is mown down by a car gave my stomach a jolt; her understated awkwardness when forced to dress up in hooker’s garb made me smile. Her performance has a quiet naturalism that one would more expect in a television play, yet hers is the face you seek out, even when she is surrounded by the more obviously scene-stealing turns.

Chief among those are Diana Rigg’s demanding yet world-weary Huma. There’s a hammi-ness and wry haughtiness about Rigg that should be perfect for the part, but somehow she never takes off; I would have been happier if Joan Collins had been given a shot at it. And, as Manuela’s big-hearted transvestite hooker friend, Agrado, Mark Gatiss misses a lot of comic opportunities, mostly because of a weird accent that can make him incomprehensible.

Towards the end, as all the women assemble on stage, there is a slide into sentimentality, which has for the most part been kept at bay – although, given the events of the preceding two hours, it would be almost impossible for it not to creep in somehow. It won’t, in any case, trouble most of the audience who seek out this play: they will certainly get what they’re paying for.