In the end, don't we all just turn into our mothers? Georgia Fitch's new play brings us four women trying to work out their place in the city, in society and in their own families - Sex in the City, London style. Less gloss, more grit. On the brink of their '40's and in the course of the play, Louise and Annie both discover they're pregnant. Louise (Michelle Butterly) is a sixth form teacher. We meet her doing a lap-dance routine at her 39th birthday. It's her party piece. She's glam, intelligent, outspoken - and a mess. She drinks too much and her relationships with men fall apart. Annie (Heather Craney) is her best friend: a single mum with a 16 year-old daughter. Freya (Jade Williams) is at school. She dresses in black and has crushes on girls. And then there's Jean (Linda Broughton), she's 65, Annie's mother and an East End matriarch.
       Georgia Fitch puts three generations on stage and makes the private political, asking the question beloved of newspaper columnists: who are women meant to be? Yummy mummy, single mum, or career girl? Is there a choice, or is motherhood always the elephant in the room?
       The words Fitch puts in the mouths her women are vivid and real - a mix of everyday-cliché and an idiom of her own, spilling forth in the cast's London tones. Fitch gives Louise her own catchphrase; 'the bastard from before', and all the women share the tick of saying 'yeah' as if it were a rhetorical question.
      The portrayal of friendship is utterly recognisable, as are the non-committal men who feature buzzing round the play's edges and the women's lives - Jim with his 'glossy independent filmmaker hair', Mathieu the born again black guy and the unseen Prozac Pete.
      This is a very here-and-now piece of realism. The exception is a humourous, curious close to the first half: bathed in the light from a pink-lit glitter-ball, grandma Jean appears as part fairy godmother, part Violet Kray. But then this kind of surreal spike, dropped into a drama of relationships and the western woman, will be very familiar to watchers of Ali McBeal and Desperate Housewives.
      So what more can I Like Mine with a Kiss give you than a night-in with some American imports? Not much. Do the references to Simone de Beauvoir make it any more deep and meaningful than Destiny's Child singing Independent Woman? Not really. But Fitch does touch us with issues we can engage with. And what gives the play its British teeth is the question of class that bites briefly into the story. It is this that pulls it back from Ali and Carrie and Co. and moves it a little closer to Mike Leigh. More grit than gloss.
Iona Firouzabadi