[In The Sport of My Mad Mother, Miss Jellicoe] is attempting to evoke the world of adolescence in a modern city setting, and she succeeds by a variety of wholly acceptable non-naturalistic devices. The two boys and girls go through their motions of boredom, swagger, funk, hate; they seem to exist in some limbo of unformed fantasy, without any specific myth to give their fantasy shape: they are filled with an undirected aggression for which their setting provides no outlet; they are waiting for something or someone to provide them with some reason—any reason at all—for doing the next thing. And since there is nothing in the ethos of contemporary life to provide this reason, they seize on any—even the slightest—pretext for galvanising themselves into some activity. These spasmodic bursts of action Miss Jellicoe works up very well; most of them—since the aggression in these children has gone sour for want of using—are acts of cruelty or violence. Sometimes they break into a spontaneous dance, but more often they turn on each other, or persecute the local half-wit, or, in the most sustained sequence of this first half, set on a clean-cut, clean-limbed young American who is wandering round their city streets, 'innocently' trying to find the reason for their state of mind.

These staccato outbursts may be accompanied by a young man on the forestage with a set of drums, and the dialogue is vibrant and taut, but as repetitive, too, and as banal as the lyrics of their favourite songs. So, Miss Jellicoe does succeed in giving us intensely and vividly an image of the world she wishes to portray: and it is not difficult to follow her exposition of it so far. It is what she does with it once it is evoked that both puzzles and, frankly, disappoints. We move deeper into a world of symbols which have, I suppose, some private, but not enough public, meaning. A brilliant, vital young creature with blood coloured hair comes in proclaiming herself an Australian (the Life Force, explains the programme); she is the leader of the gang to which the youths belong, but having got herself a child in the belly by the leader of an opposing gang, is abandoning the leadership of her own and dedicating herself (are we meant to gather from her postures?) to the pure pleasure of fertility. Now all this seems to be unnecessarily muddled and unworked out. For, you see, the plain fact is that … Miss Jellicoe has at this point slipped in a story, and has, quite simply, told it very badly. Nor is this the only muddle point. She also throws in the garlic of yet another style. There are 'alienation effects'—asides to the electrician off-stage working the lights, direct appeals to the audience and so on.