We never get to see Vivienne Mavis Taylor in this devised production. She is the Big Aunty of the title and is dead as soon as the play has begun. Her coffin takes centre stage for much of the show, but the world is already moving on.
Absent though she is, she makes her presence felt in the grief, regret and recrimination of the three children she brought up as her own. In their mourning, we sense she was as faultless and flawed as every matriarch before her.
