“My Mother’s Funeral: The Show”, Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Venue: Roundabout, Summerhall
To 26 August
Venue 26
Duration: 70 minutes
Five-star review ★★★★★
Tom Shortland in Edinburgh
A moving and satirical dramedy, on themes of class, family, art, and grief.
What sort of plays do audiences go to the theatre to see? According to Samuel Armfield’s character, a fictional artistic director of an unnamed theatre, the answer is: “plays that both challenge their worldview, and confirm it”.
Well-meaning, but oblivious to his own hypocrisy, he commissions early-career playwright Abigail Waller (Nicole Sawyerr) to write a follow up to her smash hit about growing up on a council estate in Dagenham. After giving her the licence to write about whatever she pleases, he is mortified to find that she has done just that (with a work-in-progress about LGBT insects in space).
She quickly realizes that his encouragement to write through her “unique lens”, he means the incredibly reductive lens of “I grew up poor”. But Abigail doesn’t have a choice: she needs to impress the director, because only this commission will allow her to pay for her recently deceased mother’s funeral. Her only other play idea is one about a working class girl who has lost her mum.
One of the most astonishing elements of Kelly Jones’ writing is the imagination with which she dramatizes the disconnect between classes. In a workshop rehearsal of an early draft, what Abigail writes as a throwaway joke is misinterpreted by her collaborators as a central, tragic image that “captures the working class experience”. Incapable of pushing back, she is forced to agree, and her writing drifts from truth to stereotype: the truth is diminished in favour of what seems true.
Abigail’s play-within-the-play gradually devolves into a grotesque mutation of her reality, incessantly and sickeningly manipulated by the director’s misguided notion of what “speaks truer to the working class experience”. What unfolds is both very funny, and shockingly perverse. When Abigail gets into character as Stacey, she immediately takes on cartoonish tropes of a swaggering gait, disrespectful attitude, and indiscriminate swearing. Sawyerr’s winning performance is hilarious, but through the laughter, the audience is forced to reckon with their own complicity in finding fun in such harmful stereotypes. And after buying a ticket for a show called ‘My Mother’s Funeral’, they are also forced to face their own complicity in the very commodification of pain satirised in the show.
Throughout the play, such moments of overlap between humour and tragedy are handled deftly, both in the writing, and in the glowing performances of the three-strong cast. Nicole Sawyerr plays a captivating, convincing, and consistently hilarious Abigail, orbited by Samuel Armfield and Debra Baker playing everyone from family members and colleagues to bank managers and hospital receptionists.
Each character’s mannerisms are drawn in vivid detail: the posh actress chewing on her glasses and holding a notebook to her chest, the brother unconsciously brushing his knuckles on the inside of his t-shirt, and the irritating director holding his hands in front of him whilst patronisingly tilting his head. Not only is there no chance of confusing one character with another, but each character seems complete, vital and believable.
Baker plays each of her roles with gusto and infectious humour but shines most brilliantly as Abigail’s mother. Their scenes together stand out as the most familiar, tender, and tear-inducing. Contradicting Abigail’s caricatured portrait of her own life, she didn’t grow up worrying about money. Her mother did, and made sure her daughter wouldn’t have to until she grew up.
Directed with power, and precision by Charlotte Bennett, this is great drama: brilliantly honest, funny and heartwarming.
[Photo credit above: Nicola Young]
