Review: Can Any Mother Help Me?
March 6, 2009
Date reviewed: 5 March 2009
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
There can be little doubt that Jenna Bailey’s book Can Any Mother Help Me? merits adaptation. A study of the Co-operative Correspondence Club, a group of lonely mothers that wrote candid letters about their lives to one another between 1935 and 1990, its subject matter is illuminative on human and academic levels alike. Similarly, Foursight Theatre’s credentials for delivering this adaptation are beyond doubt – the axis of the company’s work is the accentuation of female perspectives in history. However, the pristine logic that determined its route to production is dubious in one respect: its premise that a series of letters can successfully be translated into a play.
Foursight, led by Sarah Thom, tackles the problem through a number of strategies that vary in their respective success rates. In the earlier and later stages of the play, prolific line-sharing is favoured alongside the ornate choreography of Brent Lott. No-one ever seems to finish a sentence, and it’s sometimes bewildering. At times, this is done for the apparently justifiable purpose of including responses as well as original letters. However, many of the interjections are facile: “If Alistair were my husband, I’d teach him a thing or two,” one correspondent assures her spiritual sister. Given that each actress plays two characters (and possibly more in some cases), there needs to be clarity about who is speaking at what point, and there simply isn’t – the characters seem to drift in and out of one another’s psyches without any sort of pattern that you can use as a yardstick to establish who is actually writing at the time. The problem becomes particularly acute towards the end, when it isn’t clear whether one woman has so far been widowed or a whole bunch of them, because lines are sprouting from all directions.
Conversely, there are some thoroughly engaging parts in the middle, when the characters get a little breathing space. They tell their stories with few or no interruptions, and the other performers serve to give visual clout to their tales. When one character recounts an incident when she was almost raped, for instance, the remaining six actresses imitate the motion of her attacker’s unwanted hands, and this injects a supplementary dose of eeriness and unease into the scene. Even this unsavoury anecdote is conveyed with a sprightly humour that the earlier parts of the play, with their incessant movement and dashes of overlapping dialogue, lack. Moreover, some of the most moving parts are the unfortunate Isis’ short monologues revealing her degeneration in later life.
The use of music, lighting, props and visual appurtenances (courtesy of Mary Keith, Jules Bushell, Anna Watson, Naomi Dawson and Matt Spencer) is highly atmospheric, and it is partly the use to which the resultant atmospheres are put that determines the success of different scenes. Many are adorned with piano, harp or vocal harmonies and, while periodically the music seems a little unconnected or superfluous to the narrative, it’s all so pleasant that it never becomes encumbering. The props – invariably wooden and staunchly domestic – bring an underlying sense of cohesion to the series of brief stories that combine as the overall narrative. They are generally embraced by the action rather than abandoned as solitary symbols, with a particularly memorable moment when the late Cotton Goods climbs a set of stairs as her fellow correspondents stand beneath and reminisce. The six small screens on the back of the stage are effective also, as their swift, simple changes in colour and pattern give definition to the cursorily described conditions in which each character lives.
Ultimately, Can Any Mother Help Me? is a bit frustrating. This isn’t because it capitulates in the face of expectations: it’s because it both finds a formula whereby a collection of letters can be adapted for the stage and fails to adhere to it consistently. Admittedly, some aspects of the CCC that it has to cover seem almost to demand the sort of chaotic spread of dialogue that Foursight favours earlier on, such as the introductions of the women. However, the stable sanity and eminently believable performances that characterise the middle of the play are suffocated somewhat between its opening and concluding minutes which, frankly, try too hard and consequently overload the audience’s senses. But perhaps there is a gender problem in my reviewing this play. I am a man with a typically masculine distaste for small talk; the stretches of the play that I didn’t like were those abounding in relentless female nattering.
-Simon Walker
NB: My apologies for not crediting any of the fine performances in this review. This is simply because the programme doesn’t specify which actresses played which characters.
Comments
Got something to say?