This is what happened to Geoffrey Atherden when he found himself revisiting his creations for the new stage production of Mother & Son. The comedy, which ran on the ABC from 1984 to 1994, was about an ageing woman, Maggie, and her relationship with her two sons, Arthur and Robert. Ostensibly, the show's narrative was driven by Maggie (played by the inimitable Ruth Cracknell) and her wicked manipulation of Arthur (immortalised by Garry McDonald), who lives with her, his frustration and their ultimate co-dependence. Robert (a grinning Henri Szeps) was more or less the smarmy favourite who played the two off each other, and all up, it was a gentle but deceptively complex portrait of a muddled old woman and the guilt of being her child.

Back then, Atherden was of the same generation as the sons he was portraying – the immature, conflicted, grasping, bickering, ungrateful, guilty sons. Now, 20 years later, he's much closer to the age Maggie was then. And, in many ways, the tables have turned when it comes to reimagining the narrative for the 21st century.

The new stage version of Mother & Son, which stars Noeline Brown and Darren Gilshenan as Maggie and Arthur, is less a rambling commentary on a particular relationship, and more a gentle meditation on family and ageing in the modern world.

st-c

"It occurred to me that the world has changed since I wrote Mother and Son back in the 1980s when I started it all, with things like mobile phones and internet and Skype and personal alarm systems and a whole lot of stuff, and I thought I'd actually like to explore how they would affect those characters," he says.

"If someone is tending towards being confused, then here are more things to confuse her. And so that was the beginning of it, the genesis of it. But then I thought what else has happened since then? And respite care is something that has developed more since I wrote the series initially. And I've built both of those elements into the story and I think I've come up with something that's not the television series. It is the same characters, but it's all new, it's a new story."

Gilshenan, an actor who over the years has become ubiquitous on both television and stage in Australia, was slated early on as the perfect actor to play Arthur. He remembers watching the show when it first aired, and has since worked alongside McDonald in David Williamson's Don Parties On.

But he says while all the characters are in many ways indelibly linked to the actors who first portrayed them, he is adamant that the characters stand on their own.

"You know, because it was written by Geoffrey who wrote the TV series, the characters are so well drawn, and it's from the same pen so you can't get away from the similarities in the way in which he writes for these characters," he says.

"I think we made a decision, really, on day one when we sat down, not to even think about doing impersonations. We thought we'd just treat the play like a play, like any play, because it is so derivative anyway, you just can't help it. I grew the moustache just because I wanted to pay homage to Garry, and when we did the photo shoot and they dressed us up and put me beside Noelene, we look just like them anyway."

But beyond the superficialities, he says the play is more dense and complex than the television show could ever be – a single entity with a beginning, middle and end, rather than a rolling saga, week after week.

The play opened last year in Melbourne with Shane Jacobson playing Robert, but he'll be replaced this time with Rob Carlton, who has acted alongside Gilshenan in various guides, most recently the television series he wrote Chandon Pictures.

"He's got that good, shit-eating grin, Rob, which is kind of good for that role, always playing the brother off against the mother or the mother off against the brother," says Gilshenan.

Carlton is particularly excited to be finally taking up the role, having planted the seed for his involvement on the opening night of the Melbourne show, when it was already a given that Jacobson wouldn't be available this year.

"[The show] is made for now, and there is a seriousness underlying the issue, which is looking after an ageing parent who's getting more and more vulnerable, and then pressing up to Robert, the character that I'm playing with a wife, the challenges that he's got going on. He's not altogether a nice person, but it's difficult, people have tough times," he says.

"It's fertile ground for a comedy, and certainly with vulnerability too at the centre of it."

He's especially excited to be working alongside Brown, having grown up watching her on Graham Kennedy's Blankety Blanks in the 1970s. And when he did see the stage version of the show last year for the first time, he, along with many other men of his generation in the audience, brought his mum along.

"It was a blast. In actual fact, my mum - not that comparisons are odious - enjoyed the play more than the show … She found that meanness had gone away in the stage show, it was more joyous and more fun. Noelene's got a real sparkle in the way she does it, it's pretty fun."

In many ways, all three actors are aware that when it comes to the theatre audience, they will be among friends. Many will have either grown up watching the show, or viewed it as a member of Arthur's generation, and will now be approaching Maggie's.

Atherden says ultimately, being able to revisit a work he hadn't looked at in 20 years was something of a privilege.

"It was kind of like going back to people I know and love, and there were things that are a little bit different this time," he says.

"I suppose in the intervening years, I've had more to do with people who've been a little bit like Maggie, and one of the things that I've been really aware of is their ability to tell the same story over and over and over again, much to the annoyance of everyone around them, and that wasn't something that was in the television series, but it is in the play. In fact, it's one of Maggie's patterns, of having a story that she's told and everyone's heard it."

The story of Maggie, Arthur and Robert is, for many people, one that has been told already, but one that never seems to grow old.

And, in this iteration, anyway, it has a good ending, one that satisfies instead of provoking eye-rolls.

"Something that begins as a comedy has the end that you would imagine we're all heading towards, with that whole idea of our parents, and how long we stay together and what we do as we get older," says Gilshenan.

"It's got a really healthy, uplifting and satisfying kind of ending."

Mother & Son is playing at the Canberra Theatre from February 4-7.