Serpent’s Tooth shines a light on grandparents’ rights to see their grandchildren

The Serpent’s Tooth at the Burton Taylor Studio, Oxford, from September 22-23. Review by JON LEWIS

Heather Dunmore’s emotionally powerful new play, about parents and children, The Serpent’s Tooth, is named after a line in William Shakespeare’s play King Lear. The aged king rebukes his youngest daughter Cordelia saying: ‘how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child’, thereby misreading Cordelia’s tragically. Directed by Cathy Turner for Another Theatre Company, with a packed audience at the Burton Taylor Studio after a successful run in Edinburgh last month, all four women in the drama have family issues to overcome.

The central character, Kate (Jenny Johns) is, unlike Cordelia, a viperish woman, quick to bite the hand that feeds her. Her life’s journey is full of potholes. Divorced for 20 years with her ex living in Spain, she finds unsuitable men on Tinder. We see a short comic scene with a one-night stand who wears a dog collar, panting, expecting Kate to walk him around the room on a lead. The next hole in her life looks too big to swerve around. Her married daughter has taken out an injunction to stop her seeing her granddaughter, Pandora (Hetty Bentley).

What seems to be another pothole, the unexpected arrival of an older sister, Bev (Karen Ford) who was given away at birth and tracked Kate down via a DNA search, and is a childless teacher with her own burdens, takes on a role like Gloucester in King Lear. Bev tries her best for her new sister but often their new friendship is compromised by Kate’s destructive behaviour. Kate is contrasted with another grandmother, Liz (Deborah Bale) who is overtired by childminding and caring for her 96-year-old mother.

However critical Kate is of herself, the real serpent, a snake in the grass, is Kate’s (unseen) son-in-law, who decision it was to ghost Kate. It’s not all thunder and lightning, however, as Dunmore has also written amusing minor characters such as the waitress (Bentley, doubling) who reels off the menu as if she’s auditioning for drama school, pirouetting comically back to the kitchens.

Superbly acted, the production shines a light on grandparents’ rights to see their grandchildren.