Jessica Simpson slips back into Daisy Dukes following 100-lb weight loss
While promoting pieces from her clothing brand, Jessica Simpson Collection, the actress, 44, couldn't shake comparisons to her character, Daisy Duke, from her 2005 film, The Dukes of Hazzard, while posing in a leopard tank top and cutoff jean shorts.
Almost immediately after her brand posted the image, last week, social media users flocked to the comments section to marvel over how she looks exactly the same.
'Daisy Duke, is that you?' one wrote underneath the photo.
Another excited fan gushed that the mother-of-three looked like a 'supermodel.'
A third even declared that she looked 'hotter than' she did in her 2006 movie, Employee of the Month.
Throughout her more than two decades in the spotlight, Simpson has been open about feeling stuck on an endless roller coaster of yo-yo dieting and over-exercising to maintain her fluctuating figure.
While reflecting on her weight loss journey, which included losing 100 pounds after reaching 260 pounds during her pregnancy with daughter Birdie Mae, the performer talked about finding peace with her body after saying her role in Dukes of Hazzard created an unrealistic 'gold standard' for her body.
After parading her envy-inducing legs in a pair of super short shorts while portraying Daisy Duke, the mom-of-three said images from that movie have been used to as the 'before' picture for every 'is she fat or is she thin' story for' the rest of her career.
Simpson, who was just 24-years-old when she made her Hollywood debut in the widely-popular 2005 comedy, was reportedly inspired to tone up before shooting once she realized her 'butt was going to be plastered on 50 ft. screens everywhere.'
The entrepreneur, who signed with Columbia Records in 1997 as a teen, admitted that once she learned that she landed the role she 'went straight to the gym.'
'Any character that has a pair of shorts named after her, you've gotta at least try to make the shorts look as good as you possibly can,' she told People in 2005.
She continued: 'I didn't have a butt, so I did a lot of squats... I can't deprive myself of things because then I obsess about it and end up eating. I watched my diet and was in the gym to walk proud. My body is definitely an accomplishment,' she revealed.
To lean down, she adhered to the South Beach Diet, created in 2003 by cardiologist Arthur Agatston, which is a low carb, high-protein meal plan.
At this time, she mostly consumed grilled chicken, fish, and green vegetables.
In addition to eating clean, with very limited cheat foods, she was hitting the gym with Alexander for two-hour workouts six days a week.
Their grueling sweat sessions began one month before the shoot, and went down to three or four times a week during filming.
After announcing her split from Nick Lachey after nearly four years of marriage, she was criticized for her curvier figure while performing at the 2009 Chilli Cookoff in Florida.
Six months later, her apparent weight gain became a topic of conversation among fans after she performed the national anthem at the ATT Golf Tournament.
Almost immediately after her brand posted the image, last week, social media users flocked to the comments section to marvel over how she looks exactly the same
In response, she stated that it isn't 'fair that women look in the mirror and feel disgust because of what society has made them believe about beauty.'
'I've been through it myself and understand the pressures. We're all facing the same struggles together, whether you're a celebrity or not,' she continued in a 2009 interview with Glamour.
At the time, her ex-husband spoke out in her defense as he told the Associated Press 'it's ridiculous that the media is making such a big deal about [her weight gain].'
'It's ridiculous that it would be making headlines. But you can't believe everything that's written or reported in the media. I wish her nothing but happiness,' he said, at the time.
As social media trolls body shamed her size, Simpson met her now-estranged husband Eric Johnson through a mutual friend at a party in 2010.
Within six months, the lovebirds announced they were engaged in November 2010.
A year later, the beauty proudly showed off her baby bump while pregnant with their first child on the April issue of Elle magazine.
She also revealed the idea to pose completely nude was her decision.
'They didn't even ask me to do that,' she told Seacrest on his radio show in 2012. 'It was my idea. It kind of just seemed a natural thing for me to do.'
'I'm like 170 pounds and I wanted to pose nude. I try to be like 110 pounds. It's funny to be at your heaviest and feel the most confident. I just take such pride in being a mom! I just love my body more than ever now.'
While pregnant with Maxwell Drew, now ten, she mused on the Ellen DeGeneres Show that she was only expecting one child amid rumors that she was having twins.
'Believe it or not there is only one girl,' she told the host with a laugh. 'But I did get knocked up by a baller. A big football player. That's what I get. He's like 6' 4.'
Following the birth of Maxwell, Simpson became a Weight Watchers spokesperson.
She credited the points system weight loss program with helping her lose 60 pounds.
'When I had Maxwell I gained a lot of weight. More than I thought I would,' the actress told the MomFeeds blog. 'And when it came time to try to take it off, it felt overwhelming. Stepping on the scale and seeing that number was really scary.'
Within a year, she was expecting her second child, a baby boy name Ace.
'With Maxwell, I vegged out and laid around. I knew I didn't have to watch what I was eating for the first time in my life,' she said during an interview with USA Today.
For her second pregnancy, the singer-turned-business mogul told People that she 'only gained half of what I did in my first pregnancy' by continuing to work out three days a week.
'With my first pregnancy I really let go. I felt like I deserved to eat whatever I wanted,' she recalled.
Following her son's birth, she resumed her role as a Weight Watchers spokesmodel.
After giving birth for the second time, she revealed in her memoir, Open Book, that she trimmed down to 107 pounds in 2015, before undergoing a partial tummy tuck as a 35th birthday gift to herself.
'The surgery wasn't for weight loss. I weighed 107 pounds when I planned the surgery. I wanted to get rid of the stretch marks and loose skin left sagging from my back-to-back pregnancies,' she wrote.
In 2019, Simpson became pregnant with her third child, Birdie Mae, and 'reached 260lbs.'
The weight gain prompted her to throw out her scale as she joked about eating 'a box of Milk Duds for breakfast and a chocolate donut' on the Today Show, at the time.
'I was much heavier than my husband who played in the NFL, so that pregnancy really did me in. I'm almost 5ft4in, 260 was real heavy for me,' she said.
To lose the weight, she worked with trainer, Harley Pasternak, who created a program, which gradually had her working 14,000 per day, according to E! News.
She also went to a nutritionist to get her 'eating habits right' and following Harley's Body Reset Diet plan, which includes three meals a day to 'keep the metabolism humming' as well as smoothies and snacks.
'I always celebrate my body. The fact that it made children is unreal...but you just don't ever think you're going to fit back into things. It's crazy. A woman's body is phenomenal in what it can do,' she told People in April.
She continued: 'I never thought of being in a bikini again, because I was stretched out as big as the couch.'
The performer went on to state that she found a new sense of confidence after donning the swimsuit and hoped that her fans would feel the same way upon reflecting on their own achievements.
'You're proud of yourself and you deserve it...[and you're] understanding yourself and feeling good on the outside. When those two things click, the sky's the limit,' she said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
38 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Johnny Depp: ‘My mother beat me with a stick, a shoe, an ashtray. I learnt how not to raise kids'
The first time I see Johnny Depp, he is holed up in a caravan on a Budapest backstreet. Smoking a roll-up, wearing a woollen cap, and hunkered down over a script, the troubled Hollywood star is attempting to do something he hasn't done in 20 years: direct a film. Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness is a biographical snapshot of the Italian artist, set in Paris between the wars. As a piece of film-making it is compellingly chaotic; a quality reflected in both its subject and its harum-scarum director. The film, which will be released on Friday July 11, also marks a big next step for Depp: it is his first work of any substance since he was, in his own words, 'shunned, dumped, booted, deep-sixed, cancelled – however you want to define it,' by Hollywood after potentially career-ending allegations were made by his ex-wife, Amber Heard, during a succession of trials that aired some very dirty laundry in courts on both sides of the Atlantic. To recap, Depp and Heard, an actress 22 years his junior, married in 2015 and then divorced a year later. Heard claimed that Depp had abused her physically, an allegation he denied. A year later Depp sued The Sun for an article that labelled him a 'wife beater'. The judge ruled against Depp. Then in 2018, Heard wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that referred to 'sexual violence' and 'domestic abuse' without naming Depp. He sued for defamation, leading to a 2022 trial in Virginia that Depp won. A cynic might suggest that taking the reins of an art-house project like Modigliani is the calculated act of a 62-year-old man keen to shift focus off his personal life and back on to his work. Yet, everyone I speak to on set in Budapest suggests this is not the case, that Depp the director is driven by passion not strategy. 'Johnny loves risk,' says Riccardo Scamarcio, the Italian actor who plays the lead role in Modigliani. 'He knows that real creativity comes hand in hand with the danger that you can fall down.' Al Pacino, who is one of the film's producers and appears in it as an American art collector, tells me that ever since he and Depp first worked together on the crime drama Donnie Brasco (1997) there's been an understanding between them. 'I've kept up with his work and artistry through the years and just knew he had the right instruments and creative acumen to suit the very essence of this film in order to direct it,' he says. On set in Budapest, we are introduced only briefly. But recently, in London, Depp and I meet again, this time in a Soho bolthole that is serving as his temporary base while he works on the editing and post-production of the film. It also appears to function as an ad hoc studio for his painting and music-making, and has the feel of a secret hideout. When I walk in, my eye is immediately drawn to a gigantic wine glass sitting in the window. On the side, someone has scrawled the words 'mega f---ing pint'. From his perch behind a desk, surrounded by canvases, guitars and vintage bric-a-brac, Depp catches me staring. 'That,' he says, 'might be the closest to art that I've ever gotten'. It suggests that, whatever else he says, his three years of very public court proceedings – which followed a loose trajectory from humiliation through to a form of vindication – have left their mark. The 'mega pint' is a reference to an episode in which Heard's lawyer asked Depp a question about a video which appeared to show him destroying cupboards while drinking a large glass of wine. When the lawyer described the glass as a 'mega pint', Depp couldn't hold back a smile – and an internet-breaking meme was born. In conversation today, Depp growls and mutters: at times he skirts close to incoherence; at others, he makes magnetic, amusing company. He is keen to talk more about the film, and his unconventional approach to casting it. 'I cast Riccardo first, based on a photograph,' he says. 'His eyes reminded me of Oliver Reed. I f---ing love Oliver Reed. He was dangerous and he was funny and he was cool. So I went, 'That's the dude [for Modigliani].'' His gamble paid off; Scamarcio is excellent in the film. Depp says now that he only agreed to direct because his old friend Pacino had asked him to. 'I told him I ain't a director per se but I'll give it a shot. I mean he's nuts and he knows that I'm nuts.' But Depp also saw a kindred spirit in Modigliani – the troubled, hard-living, misunderstood artist. He takes me through a brief biography – he knows his stuff – before coming back, as he often does, to his late friend, the writer Hunter S Thompson. 'Hunter used that quote from Dr Johnson at the beginning of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: 'He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.' That's the definition of Hunter and it's the definition of Modigliani.' The statement hangs in the air for a second before Depp jumps in with a hasty clarification. 'It's not that men are more in pain, but just in general,' he adds. 'You can apply it to a woman too, of course.' For though Depp can meander, he is not un-self-aware. He knows that the long-running skirmishes with Heard painted him as misogynistic, violent and drunk – the man who had it all exhibiting all the worst traits of the over-entitled alpha male. He also knows that, had he wanted to, he could have stepped out of the limelight for good, played his guitars, done his art, opted for the quiet life. With decades of film-making behind him, as he says, 'I don't have anything to prove'. So why on earth is he taking the risk of putting himself out there again? One explanation is that, as he says himself, he's 'nuts'. But it seems more likely that it's because there's a streak in Depp that cannot resist inviting trouble. He describes his experience on 21 Jump Street, the American cop show that first brought him fame in the late 1980s. It made him an instant teen idol but he was soon feeling boxed-in by the multi-series contract and chafing against being 'considered to be a TV actor, which was the last thing I wanted'. He recalls how, in the early 1990s, he was asked by an interviewer why American kids should pay any attention to a young actor playing an undercover cop busting drug gangs. 'And I said, 'Well, that's easy. 'Cause I started taking drugs when I was about 11.' And then I went through the whole thing. And she asked me, have you tried marijuana? I went uh-huh. Cocaine? Uh-huh. Heroin? Uh-huh. I mean you name it because that's how I grew up. By the time I was 15, 16, I had a pretty decent chance at a doctorate in pharmacology and alcohol mixing and drinking.' That probably wasn't a great career move, but what he couldn't stand, he says, was people trying to make him into something he wasn't. 'I didn't like the labels. What they were desperate to do was just make me a poster boy: 'He's the new James Dean.' No, I'm not.' Of course, Depp soon shrugged off those labels, and left television behind to become one of the biggest film stars of his generation, nominated three times for the Best Actor Oscar. Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco, a series of memorable collaborations with Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and perhaps, above all, a career-defining role channelling Keith Richards as Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney's blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean films, which earned him many millions of dollars and fans. Through it all, however, a major part of the Depp persona has been a punk-rock attitude. He doesn't care what people think, and he wants you to know that. 'Listen, they've said all kinds of things out there in the world about me, and it doesn't bother me. I'm not running for office.' But, I say, surely it starts to matter when what people are saying stops you from doing the work you want to do? In 2020, after he lost his libel case against News Group Newspapers, he was dropped from the third film in the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts franchise. He was replaced by the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, having filmed just one scene. 'It literally stopped in a millisecond,' Depp says, 'like, while I was doing the movie. They said we'd like you to resign. But what was really in my head was they wanted me to retire'. His response? 'F--- you. There's far too many of me to kill. If you think you can hurt me more than I've already been hurt you're gravely mistaken.' When I ask Depp what he means by already being hurt, he tells me about his mother, Betty Sue. Depp was born in Kentucky in 1963, the youngest of Betty Sue and her husband John Depp's four children. The family would often move around, eventually settling in south Florida when Johnny was seven. Betty Sue, who died in 2016 aged 81, was a waitress. She was also, Depp now says, violent and unpredictable. 'She beat me with a f------ stick, a f------ shoe, an ashtray, a phone, it didn't matter, man. But I thank her for that. She taught me how not to raise kids. Just do the exact opposite of what she did.' When it came, fatherhood was not something he planned, Depp has said, being instead 'part of the wonderful ride I was on'. That ride began in the early 80s, when having dropped out of school, he moved to Los Angeles with his rock band and married Lori Anne Allison, the sister of his band's bassist. As a make-up artist, she inadvertently launched his film career by introducing him to Nicholas Cage (another actor who has documented his struggles with drink and drugs), with whom Depp would go out carousing. Cage recommended Depp for a bit part in the Wes Craven horror movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and without any experience, but with his famous good looks reportedly catching the eye of Craven's daughter, Depp won the part. Soon his accidental career as an actor had overtaken his intended path as a musician, with his teen idol status enhanced by engagements (following his divorce from Allison) to stars Jennifer Grey (of Dirty Dancing) and Sherilyn Fenn (of Twin Peaks). His partnership with Burton, which started in 1990 with Edward Scissorhands, also led to Depp proposing to Winona Ryder, his co-star in the movie (famously, when their relationship foundered three years later, he had his tattoo reading 'Winona Forever' altered to 'Wino Forever'). Later, Depp dated the model Kate Moss and then the French singer Vanessa Paradis, with whom he had his two children, Lily-Rose, 26, also an actor, and Jack, 23, an artist and musician. He is now rumoured to be dating Russian model Yulia Vlasova, who is 33 years his junior. Today he looks back on his 'wonderful ride' and acknowledges that much of it, especially recently, has not been so wonderful. But he says his tough childhood has also helped him develop a skin so thick that he has been able to brush off even the worst accusations slung at him in court. 'I've been accused of the deepest unpleasantries that you can be hit with. And for what reason? I think that's probably pretty clear,' he says, rubbing together finger and thumb in the international mime for money. 'This sounds like horses--- but one can simply hold hate [until it] inspires some species of malice in your skull. Makes you think of revenge. But hating someone is a great big responsibility to hang on to. The real truth of it, that I won't allow, is that in order for me to hate, I have to care first. And I don't care. What should I care about? That I got done wrong to [by others]? Plenty of people get done wrong.' So why did he bother to fight those perceived wrongs in court? 'I fought it because had I not then I wouldn't have been me,' he says. 'Of course everyone tells you, 'Don't do it. You're crazy.'' But, he says, if the allegation made against him – 'a lie!' – of which he was cleared was going 'to be the deciding factor of whether or not I have the capability of making movies in Hollywood? F--- you'. The longer Depp talks, the clearer it becomes that the trials of the past few years have left him somewhere between defiance and acceptance. Whatever the case, Depp appears once again capable of making movies in Hollywood. This year, he looks set to embark on The Carnival at the End of Days, another collaboration with Terry Gilliam, who directed him in the 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Gilliam has cast him as Satan. Then there's Day Drinker, from The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb, in which Depp is reunited with Penelope Cruz, his former co-star in Blow; Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; and Murder on the Orient Express. At the height of the trial, when Heard's fans were baying for his blood, such a fully fledged return for Depp seemed almost inconceivable. So much time was lost on his legal battles; now he's eager to make up for it. 'Going through all that in real time amounted to seven or eight years,' he says. 'It was a harsh, painful internal journey. Would I rather not have gone through something like that? Absolutely. But I learnt far more than I ever dreamed I could.'
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Madison LeCroy gives BIRTH! Southern Charm star details traumatic 48-hour labor and reveals second child's name
Southern Charm star Madison LeCroy confirmed the arrival of her second child and detailed her traumatic 48-hour labor story on Thursday. The reality TV fixture, 34, revealed to Us Weekly that she gave birth to a daughter named Teddi — her first child with husband Brett Randle, 38 — on Sunday, June 29. Madison named her newborn after her late father, Ted LeCroy, who died in 2023. The star is also mom to son, Hudson, 12, whom she shares with her first husband, Josh Hughes. Madison revealed that Teddi required time in the NICU after being born via C-section at just 34 weeks, which is roughly eight months into pregnancy. 'I was in labor for 48 hours basically [because] my water broke at home,' she said of the 'crazy' start to her birth experience. Madison, who is based in South Carolina, was thrown for a loop when she went into labor at 2:30 a.m. after attending a concert for her mother Tara LeCroy's birthday. At the time, her husband Randle was across the country in California for work. 'I ran upstairs, and I was like, 'Mom, I don't have anything packed,'' Madison recalled. 'It was funny 'cause me and her both were like in my closet trying to pick out what we were gonna wear to the hospital.' When she finally arrived to the hospital, Madison learned that she was one centimeter dilated. Being that she was only eight months into her pregnancy when her water broke, Madison said that the doctors tried as long as they could to delay Teddi's delivery. 'We kind of prolonged the labor and Brett got here and then we waited another day and had the C-section and there she was five minutes later,' she explained. After spending 48 hours in labor, Madison was forced to send Teddi to the NICU for 'a few days' because it is hospital 'protocol' for premature babies. 'She's a little. She's only five pounds, but she's breathing on her own and hasn't needed any oxygen or anything like that,' Madison shared. 'She's kind of a little trooper.' Madison said that her doctors were 'shocked with how early she was that she was gonna be this independent. So I was like, "Oh, I wasn't shocked at all."' Madison then shared what music she listened to during her C-section. 'My doctor, she's amazing. And at this point she was, like, a friend, and we were sitting there talking and we were like, "What's the playlist gonna be for this?"' Madison recalled to Us Weekly. 'And we were joking around, we're like, "Girl power, let's go Taylor Swift." So we did, we rocked out to Taylor Swift during the surgery. 'So that's what she was born to. Now don't ask me what song, because at that point I don't have no idea. But yeah, girl mode all the way.' In order to feel and look her best for Teddi's early arrival, Madison said she called in her glam squad last-minute. 'This is even crazier. Once I got [to the hospital] and I realized I didn't even have, like, a toothbrush, I ended up having like my glam come to me,' she shared. 'I did a blowout and then I did a little fast face, like, makeup natural with one of my girls.' Madison also spoke to PageSix about her newborn daughter and her reasoning for naming her after her late father, Ted. She said that she wanted her dad's name to 'live on through [her] baby,' adding, 'We might as well just make the name continue to grow.' In regards to Teddi's arrival, she told the outlet that her and Randle are 'super excited and just living in pure bliss at the moment. It doesn't even feel real.' Madison and her husband, who have married since November 2022 when they tied the knot in Mexico, shared the happy news that they were expecting in February. 'And just like that... our world is changing in the most magical way! ✨ Seeing 'Pregnant' on this @clearbluetest was the best moment of our lives. We can't wait to meet you, little one,' she captioned her Instagram post announcing the news. The reality TV star said she was 'shocked' when her pregnancy test came back positive. 'Honestly, when Brett and I were making this plan of growing our family, I was like, 'Okay, we've got to make this as easy as possible,'' she shared with People. 'So I actually started using the Clearblue ovulation test, and I got a smiley face. Once we got the smiley face, we were like, 'Okay, it's go time,' and it instantly happened.' 'I was shocked, I thought I had all summer long, but it happened and I felt actually pretty great other than some minor headaches,' LeCroy continued. 'But other than that, just eating all the food and enjoying myself.' The good news comes after Brett's diagnosis with thyroid cancer and the death of her father in 2023. 'I honestly was pinching myself because I hadn't heard good news in it felt like the last two years, so to hear something that was so positive and something that we've been wanting and looking forward to was just super exciting,' she shared. 'And of course, everybody in our family and everybody was rooting for us.' She shared how excited she is, saying she's so happy to finally share the news with her fans. 'I'm ecstatic. I just can't get enough. I'm so glad to finally be able to talk about it, she said. 'I've been in hiding for too long, and so I'm excited to be able to show the bump off.' Madison shared that the first person she told about her pregnancy was her 'best friend,' her son Hudson. He was my first one that I told,' she shared. 'And yeah, he was excited. Obviously, at first he's like, 'Eh.' 'And then we recently got a puppy, so he goes, 'Actually I really love caring, so might as well.' I was like, 'Okay. This is going to be way different, but okay,'' Since it's been 12 years since she had her first baby, LeCroy explained that things are a bit different this time around. 'It's the total opposite than what I experienced at 22 years old,' she explained. I had the glowing skin and I had all that, and this is the opposite. 'I'm exhausted, full-blown adult acne, and didn't lose any weight at the beginning, versus [with] Hudson, I was starting off in a negative. So I can just tell it's a 12-year difference.'
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Mother Play review – Sigrid Thornton is terrific as a gin-soaked, monstrous matriarch
Poisonous and heavily self-medicating mothers are a standard in the theatre, from Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night to Violet Weston in August: Osage County. Self-absorbed, vain and hypercritical, they tend to stalk their stages like injured lionesses, their own offspring the convenient targets of their abuse and cynicism. US playwright Paula Vogel adds Phyllis Herman (Sigrid Thornton) to this list, as monstrous and brittle as any of them. While Mother Play (the subtitle is A Play in Five Evictions) flirts with the toxicity and histrionics of those antecedents, it feels closer in spirit to Tennessee Williams' 'memory play' The Glass Menagerie. Where Williams created the character of Tom as an authorial surrogate, Vogel gives us Martha (Yael Stone), who is likewise desperate to escape her mother's clutches while trying to understand what makes her tick. There's a deep melancholy working under the play, a sense of all that's been lost to the ravages of time and forgetting. Like Williams, Vogel is mining a lot of her own biography here – her mother was also named Phyllis, and worked as a secretary for the Postal Service after the breakdown of her marriage – and she traces the outline of a family in slow decline with poignancy and skill. The rot sets in during the first eviction, as Martha and her elder brother Carl (Ash Flanders) move boxes and furniture around while Phyllis drinks herself into a state of grotesque self-pity. The kids are only 12 and 14, and yet already they seem like the parents to a stubborn and petulant child. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning As the play progresses and the narrative moves inexorably through the decades – it opens in the early 60s and ends in the present day – this parental imbalance only worsens. Gin-soaked and combative, Phyllis alternately berates, guilts and clings to her children like resented support structures; one moment she is rejecting them for being gay, the next grasping for their approval. She's fiendish and cruel, but Vogel also lets us see the damage done to her, the ways in which she is shaped by the casual cruelties of others. It isn't so much a cycle of abuse as a long sputtering out, levelled by great reserves of forgiveness and stoicism from the kids. Thornton is terrific, constantly alive to the character's gaping flaws without once losing the central pathos that keeps us engaged and sympathetic. She has a harsh, steely quality under the gaucheness and impropriety that softens as the play progresses, eventually reaching a kind of weary dignity and poise. Stone finds great depth and complexity in Martha, pained by her mother's sadism but determined to see beyond it. Flanders is solid in the lesser part of Carl, and together the cast paint a convincing and intricate family dynamic. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Director Lee Lewis gets many things right, which makes the ones she gets wrong seem more egregious, somehow. Those performances are beautifully calibrated and expertly pitched, but Vogel's startling tonal shifts and narrative longueurs seem to trip Lewis up; too often the production falters, pitching into silliness and camp. One scene in a gay bar – where Phyllis starts dancing a conga line with her adult children – feels desperate, and the less said about a giant cockroach that waves at the audience the better. This reticence seeps into Christina Smith's design, which is surprisingly banal and unwieldy – although not her costumes, which are little treasure troves of period wit and personality. The family's five different abodes are simultaneously underdone and overly complicated, necessitating some clunky transitions. Niklas Pajanti's inventive lighting helps, pitching from glamorous to desolate as the family's fortunes change. Kelly Ryall's compositions are similarly mercurial, jaunty one minute and plaintive the next. Vogel is a fascinating and idiosyncratic playwright, and if this production of Mother Play doesn't quite coalesce, it still achieves moments of beauty and quiet awe. That temporal scope allows the actors to track the emotional beats of their characters' lives like pins on a map, and if political and social events tend to disappear into the background, their effect on the family's interpersonal relationships is forcefully underlined. The moral battle between liberalism and conservatism, those ideological polarities currently tearing the US apart, are depicted here as fissures of the self and the family unit, a long time coming. Memory plays are by definition fragmentary and elliptical, so perhaps the staccato rhythms and jolting tonal shifts are necessary. The cliche of the monstrous feminine, where the mother becomes the repository of all the family's sickness and perversion, is subtly but surely unpacked and debunked. What we're left with is a mother and a daughter tremulously reaching for care, compassion and connection. In this way, it feels vital and contemporary. Mother Play, by the Melbourne Theatre Company, is on at the Sumner theatre until 2 August
