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MADONNA ON THE ROCKS

 
Mark Harding Review by Mark Harding 3 Published: 6 Aug 2025 Assembly Roxy Show Dates: 31 Jul 2025-24 Aug 2025

Are you looking after a young baby? Does no one understand what you are going through? Then go and see The Madonna – she understands…

The show is perfect for intimate fringe venues

The human animal has the disadvantage of a mind. Motherhood is the prime example where the animal’s demands clash with the mind’s needs. In a riotous comedy musical, Marie Hamilton explores this conflict in excruciating detail.

Nobody expects to live up to the ideal of the Madonna and Child but the everyday gap between societal expectations and lonely reality is brutal. Hamilton has a double whammy: she is a stay-at-home mother (‘When are you thinking of going back to work?’) and an actor (‘Been in anything recently?’). What makes it worse is that she can’t stand her mother (who, in turn, couldn’t stand her mother).

Full of all-too-believable embarrassments and characters, Hamilton acts out a story that eventually becomes how she came to write the show we’re watching.

The show is perfect for intimate fringe venues. Hamilton creates a direct, humorous connection with audience members so that, despite the artifice of songs and props, it feels like chatting with a witty friend in a café. For a show that’s essentially forty minutes of complaining, her comedy and self-awareness ensure it never feels like a self-indulgent whinge.

The show’s concluding reconciliation with her mother feels artificial and forced – although the ultimate message that fulfillment can be found through mutual help is strong.

So, to any partners of mothers reading this – go on, take a shift of babysitting and let her go.

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The Blurb:

She used to have dreams, now she has a baby. A sad, aging sack full of milk and regret. Madonna On The Rocks is a visceral, hilarious call to arms. A neon-lit, techno-soundtracked, mental breakdown at the Stay and Play. It’s about egos, responsibilities and the struggle to be an artist, or to have any career at all really, and still be a relatively decent parent. With songs inspired by Madonna, Peaches and Nina Simone. Written and performed by Marie Hamilton, composed in Berlin by Cameron Mackintosh Award winner Ben Osborn with dramaturgy from Bryony Kimmings.