Thirty or so years on Mother & Son is back, this time as a play rather than a TV series. You won't find Garry McDonald as hapless son Arthur and the incomparable Ruth Cracknell as mother Maggie is no longer with us, but you will find Noeline Brown and Darren Gilshenan doing a stage version that has its own delights.

With the able support of Rob Carlton as Arthur's shifty dentist brother Robert and Nicki Wendt as his highly unlikeable wife Liz, Mother & Son on stage at first seems a gentler retelling. But that would be to underestimate Brown as the canny Maggie, who, despite the apparent onset of some form of dementia, is quite capable of shaping to her own ends a universe that now contains mobile phones, call centres which are not in Australia and talking to the grandchildren by Skype.

Brown's Maggie operates in a world of her own, full of retold stories and missed meanings. Arthur finds her teetering dangerously up ladders and her cookery risks burning the house down. Brown's performance has a gentle relentlessness as she explores the logic that Maggie lives by. Her husband is dead and the world is passing her by but Brown shows clearly how this woman survives.

Much of this depends on Arthur staying with her. Gilshenan quietly catches Arthur's desperation in the face of emotional manipulation from his mother. He wants to marry the cheerful Anita (Rachael Beck) who is not fazed by Maggie as she is dealing with parallel family problems. But at every turn there's the problem of what to do with Maggie.

There's no help coming from his brother. The deep ironies of the family dynamics emerge as it becomes clear that Robert is the favourite son. It's never clear why Maggie would prefer his brand of awful manipulation but she does not see it. Carlton's performance gives a glimpse at times of the cute gangling little boy that Maggie still adores at the expense of the far more reliable Arthur. And after all, he is a dentist.

Meanwhile Maggie can't come to grips with the MedicAlert round her neck and thinks the bright young visiting social services assessor (Sharon Davis) is there to give her a test you can study for, not a test to see if she can still function at home. In a poignant aside she finds kindred spirit Monica (Robyn Arthur) in a nursing home and they lament the modern fashion for showing bra straps, exposing clothing labels and getting tattoos. But they still can't remember each other's names.

The plot meanders all over the onstage cardboard cutout of a suburban house, the grandchildren on Skype are terrible reflections of their parents and the audience hovers between horror and hilarity as they contemplate their own family dynamics. It's well played, well written and a welcome return to the world of Mother & Son.