Midnight Your Time performed by Diana Quick

Veteran English actress of the big and small screen Diana Quick—best known for her role in the 1980s Granada TV serialisation of Brideshead Revisited—performs this one woman play presented by HighTide productions (the company behind last year’s Fringe First winner Lidless) about a retired Islington lawyer’s one-way conversations with her daughter in Palestine via recorded webcam message, and the fraught relationship they reveal.

Judy is a liberal-by-design busy-body with too much time on her hands, who frets over petty politics in her woman’s peace league volunteer organisation and competes with the neighbours to be the first to have the Afghan war refugee recently arrived in the area over for tea. She’s arranged to speak to her daughter Helen—who has moved to the Middle East to work for an aid agency, much against her mum’s wishes—online once a week. But she can never raise her; for all her honest affections and concerns for her daughter, Judy can’t help herself from trying to “micromanage” Helen’s life.

Quick’s performance is polished, but the staging is questionable. The flickering video backdrop gives the piece a discomforting, eerie quality, yet staging the whole thing on a slowly rotating platform isn’t sufficient to keep things from feeling static. By the end, the webcam format becomes insufferably tedious and a solid ten minutes or more could have been swept out of an untidy narrative. Still, it’s a play that any parent whose children have fled far from the nest will easily relate to.