The Silver Cord at Finborough Theatre

“We’re just like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth because we’ve got into a mess we cannot get ourselves out of… and we’re just getting deeper and deeper into it.” This pivotal line from Sidney Howard’s 1927 domestic drama The Silver Cord still resonates with chilling clarity in Joe Harmston’s gripping revival, encapsulating the corrosive core of the Phelps family’s entanglement. Laying bare the Freudian depths of possessive maternal affection, Harmston’s absorbing melodrama boldly confronts the destructive grip of a mother’s mind games and unyielding control.

In 1925 Boston, wealthy widow Mrs. Phelps (Sophie Ward) hosts a seemingly innocuous tea party for her two grown-up sons, David (George Watkins), who arrives with his new wife Christina (Alix Dunmore), and Robert (Dario Coates) with his fiancée Hester (Jemma Carlton). Mrs. Phelps’s genteel hospitality quickly turns into a showcase of passive-aggressive digs, taking every opportunity to undermine the women. She dismisses Christina’s biologist profession as a mere hobby and attempts to sabotage their newlywed plans of moving to New York, but Christina very quickly catches on to her tactics and proves more than capable of standing her ground.

Meanwhile, Hester, unnerved by Mrs Phelps’s influence on Robert, watches as her engagement falters. A moment of sheer panic sees her fleeing the house in what veers the play into horror. “Awful things happen here!” she cries. Mrs Phelps’s only concern? Her sons catching pneumonia chasing after her. But offering levity in this otherwise harrowing spectacle is Hester’s takeaway: to marry an orphan next time around.

Between David, who initially appears immune to his mother’s grasp, and Robert’s maddening obsequiousness, both reveal themselves equally tangled in the strings of her puppet show. The women they love must either wake them up to it or make a clean break for their sanity. While Sophie Ward’s compelling performance as a “son-devouring tigress” provides the added depth of Mrs Phelps’s troubling inability to grasp the full weight of her behaviour no doubt rooted in her deep-seated loneliness, her character still falls short of moving beyond the traditional evil mother-in-law trope.

Set designer Alex Marker’s efficient use of the cramped staging really brings out the play’s suffocating family tensions. Framed childhood portraits of Mrs Phelps with her sons adorn each wall, visually representing how she keeps them mentally frozen in time as children, refusing to see them as the grown-ups they have become. An unassuming chandelier hangs at the centre, adding a touch of domesticity that highlights the Phelps family home for what it really is: a home and a prison.

Despite being anchored by five standout performances, the play feels laboriously drawn out at times, succeeding if its aim is to make audiences feel the weight of Mrs Phelps’s presence as acutely as her family does. In this disturbing portrayal of a mother’s love stretched beyond all limits, will her sons ever truly see the silver cord – and find the resolve to sever it?