I have started writing. This is new. Or at least, writing original plays, which is new for me. After a decade of dabbling in stage adaptations and opera libretti (easy when someone else has done the hard work of creating story and characters for you) I have finally taken the plunge and started writing my own plays. Not just one play but three, and counting.
All of them explore, in varying ways, my ambivalence about motherhood, and indeed the impetus to write them was born out of my increasing frustration with the dearth of mothers portrayed on our stages. Or to be more specific – the dearth of plays that explore motherhood (or parenthood) as a theme. Plenty of plays feature mothers as characters, hundreds in fact – family dramas are after all the mainstay of our theatrical canon. But very very few actually explore the experience of motherhood. Even ‘The Mother’ – which just closed at the Tricycle, which I had hoped might perhaps explore motherhood – that messy, complex, mind-numbingly-boring, wonderful, lonely, necessary, primal job that occupies around 50% of the human race at one point in their lives. But in fact it is a play about archetypes, not about motherhood at all, although Gina McFee does give a wonderful performance finding a precious vein of humanity in a very brittle and unlike-able character.
The newest of my theatrical writings – a solo piece written in rhyme/spoken word – I posted on Facebook a few weeks ago as a bit of an experiment. A non-theatre-mum friend had asked to read it and found it such an accurate reflection of her own experiences of motherhood that I wondered if other fellow mums might take something from it. The response was overwhelming, and overwhelmingly positive, so I thought I’d post it here – in an even more public capacity – in the hope that it can reach more mums, and dads too, and non parents – just more human beings with whom it might strike a chord.
I hope it may be staged at one point too, but even if that never happens it’s heartening to know that simply the reading of it is touching some lives.
Here it is – feel free to share:
poppyburtonmorgan 