Theatre review: Some Woman

Regular readers of this blog may both recall that while I rate Anne-Marie Duff as an actress, as far as her taste in plays goes it's fair to say we don't see eye to eye: Based on most of the shows I've seen her in I suspect she's the sort of person to cite the word "harrowing" as the main, if not only, qualifier of a play's greatness. So I approached Helen Edmundson's Some Woman with my usual trepidation, as Duff plays Julie, a mother of two who, after her divorce from Richard (Geoffrey Streatfeild) gave up her professional ambitions to look after their two daughters. Now both grown up, the eldest Kate (Hannah Onslow) is a terrifyingly ambitious perfectionist who seems to view everything her mother does and says as a sign of weakness, while the youngest Ginny (Grace Doherty) has struggled with depression and an eating disorder but is now hoping she's strong enough to go away to university.Julie has spent her life not making waves, but when an 11-year-old boy on a train station…