My Mother Said I Never Should GCSE Student Guide 9781474251655, 9781474251686, 9781474251662

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication page
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER ONE The Play
Introduction: Reading drama
Overview
Contexts
Themes
Characters
Dramatic technique
Critical reception
Related work
Glossary of dramatic terms
CHAPTER TWO Behind the Scenes
Charlotte Keatley (playwright)
Brigid Larmour (director)
Louisa Warde (teacher)
CHAPTER THREE Writing About the Play
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

My Mother Said I Never Should GCSE Student Guide i

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My Mother Said I Never Should GCSE Student Guide SOPHIE BUSH Series Editor: Jenny Stevens

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Methuen Drama 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc © Sophie Bush 2016 Sophie Bush has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN :

PB : ePDF : epub:

978-1-4742-5165-5 978-1-4742-5166-2 978-1-4742-5167-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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For my mother, and all the others, who said we should, could and would.

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements viii

1 The Play

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Introduction: Reading drama 1 Overview 2 Contexts 10 Themes 17 Character 29 Dramatic technique 44 Critical reception 58 Related work 63 Glossary of dramatic terms 66

2 Behind the Scenes

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Charlotte Keatley (playwright) 71 Brigid Larmour (director) 77 Louisa Warde (teacher) 83

3 Writing About the Play

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Bibliography 105 Index 107

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A huge thank you to Matthew Pateman and the Department of Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University for enabling me to undertake this project. Many thanks also for the guidance of Anna Brewer at Bloomsbury and Jenny Stevens, and to Charlotte Keatley, Brigid Larmour, Louisa Warde and Jamie Wildgoose for their contributions, advice and support.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Play Introduction: Reading drama When reading a novel, many people imagine or visualize the story playing out in their mind’s eye, rather like their own film of the book. Although this is quite a common thing to do, not everyone does this, and for those who do not, the book is a complete work of literature in its own right. However, when you are reading a play, this is not the case. The play text is not a complete work of literature; it is a blueprint, or set of instructions, for performance. The lines of dialogue are not intended to be read silently in your head, but to be spoken aloud by actors. The stage directions are not merely descriptive passages, but guidelines for designers, directors and actors on how to bring the world of the play to life. So when you read a play, you must try to visualize how it would, or could, look, sound and feel on a stage. The best way to do this is to act sections out yourselves. Some classrooms will not provide the easiest space for doing this, so you might have to make do with reading aloud. If this is the case, try to discuss, as a group, what sort of space each scene is taking place in. It may also help you to draw your ideas for the spaces and settings of the play. Another important thing to bear in mind is that plays have two main types of writing within them: the dialogue spoken by the characters, and the stage directions that give actors, directors and designers instructions about how the dialogue 1

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should be spoken, or what sort of environment the scene takes place in. Depending on the type and style of play, there may be a lot of stage directions or hardly any at all. For example, Shakespeare’s plays, which you may also be studying, have very few stage directions. When you are reading a play, it is sometimes tempting to skip over the stage directions and concentrate only on the dialogue, so you can get through the story more quickly. This is inadvisable; if a playwright has chosen to include stage directions in their play, you should see them as an important part of the text. They may reveal crucial parts of the narrative that you would be lost without, and they also indicate vital elements of characterization, setting and atmosphere that you cannot afford to miss. If you are reading the play aloud in class, it is a good idea to nominate someone to read aloud the stage directions in each scene. Remember though, that in a finished production of the play it would be down to the actors and production team to communicate the essence of the stage directions to an audience, who would not have direct access to them, as those reading the play have.

Overview A straightforward narrative synopsis cannot tell us everything we need to know when studying a play, because a play is defined by how its story is told as much as it is by the story itself. Keatley says, ‘I began My Mother Said I Never Should with the structure and built it in three dimensions in my head before applying words. I started writing in the languages of light, colour, environment, sound, object, costume, and action or dance’ (Keatley 1994: xxv). Therefore, as you read each scene of the play, do not just ask yourself ‘what happens in this scene?’ Start by asking yourself: 1 2 3

What does the audience see in this scene? What do they hear? What actions do the characters carry out?

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Answering these questions should help you to notice how the writer uses dramatic devices, such as set, costume, props, lighting and sound effects, and how she instructs the actors to perform, in order to convey meaning, establish character and develop themes. Only once you have answered these questions will you be able to assess what the scene contributes to, or tells us about, the play as a whole. Therefore, the following should be seen as a quick reference guide to the play, not a comprehensive account of it.

Act one, scene one Place: The Wasteground Time: Unspecified By opening the play with a scene set in an unspecified time and vague location, in which adult actors play the roles of young children, each dressed in costumes associated with four different time periods, Keatley signals to the reader or audience that the play should not be seen as a straightforward naturalistic or realistic one. The girls fantasize about killing their mothers, and their conversation also naively introduces some key concerns of the play, such as marriage and having babies.

Act one, scene two Place: Doris’s front room, Cheadle Hulme, Manchester Time: Christmas Eve, 1940 and May, 1961 In contrast to the vague setting of the previous scene, this scene establishes a very specific sense of time and place, with the help of period-specific music (George Formby’s ‘Chinese Laundry Blues’) and the sound of an air raid. We are introduced to the forty-year-old Doris, her nine-year-old daughter Margaret and the strained relationship between them. Part way through, the scene jumps forward twenty years, to contrast the relationship between Doris and Margaret with the relationship between

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Doris and her nine-year-old granddaughter Jackie, which seems much warmer.

Act one, scene three Place: The Wasteground Time: Unspecified With minimal understanding, the girls talk about periods, ‘catching a baby’, having a baby and being left by your husband. They play doctors and nurses. Doris asks if they can play babies tomorrow, but Rosie says they will have to play weddings first, as you have to be married before you have a baby.

Act one, scene four Place: Margaret’s garden, Raynes Park, London Time: May 1969 This is the first scene in which we meet Margaret and Jackie as adults: Jackie is almost eighteen and Margaret is thirty-eight. They are arguing about the fact Jackie has had sex with her boyfriend, and the generational difference between their attitudes to sex is very clear. We see Margaret reproducing some of Doris’s emotional detachment in the way she treats her own daughter, as well as the theme of resentment towards the increased options available to younger generations.

Act one, scene five Place: Doris’s garden, Cheadle Hulme, Manchester Time: May 1961 We move backwards in time, to later in the same day that the second part of Scene Two is set. We see that Margaret and Jackie’s relationship is warmer at this time, but that Margaret and Doris’s relationship is still very strained. We also learn that Margaret has had a miscarriage, which Doris believes is a result of her working too hard whilst pregnant.

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Act one, scene six Place: Jackie’s council flat, Hulme, Manchester Time: December 1971 Although set only two and a half years after Scene Four, Jackie’s life has changed drastically. She is living in a run-down council flat in Manchester, trying to look after a screaming threemonth-old baby: Rosie. Clearly struggling to cope, without the support of a partner, friends or family, Jackie feels forced to give Rosie up to her mother to raise. When Margaret arrives to collect Rosie, she is visibly disapproving of Jackie’s lifestyle and surroundings. Jackie is horrified to discover that Margaret intends to raise Rosie to believe that she is Margaret’s own child, but has little choice other than to accept this condition.

Act one, scene seven Place: Doris’s garden, Cheadle Hulme, Manchester Time: August 1951 We move backwards in time again, and see Margaret, aged twenty, and Doris, aged fifty-one, taking down washing. There is tension and irritation between them, partially caused by Margaret’s relationship with an American airman, Ken, whom she intends to marry. Margaret is adamant that she wants a ‘proper job’ rather than children; a statement which carries dramatic irony, given that we already know Margaret must have had Jackie only a year after this scene is set.

Act one, scene eight Place: The Wasteground Time: Unspecified Only Jackie and Rosie are present in this wasteground scene. Again, we see adult themes and issues filtered through their naivety. Jackie makes reference to her daddy making her mummy

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cry, suggesting this is a sign of love. Rosie threatens that she can no longer be best friends with Jackie now she has kissed a boy.

Act one, scene nine Place: Raynes Park, London and Cheadle Hulme, Manchester Time: December 1971 This scene dramatizes a telephone conversation between Margaret and Doris, taking place later on the same day as Scene Six, after Margaret has got home from picking Rosie up from Jackie’s. We know this because we can see the Moses basket with Rosie in by Margaret, and hear Rosie crying from time to time. Margaret cannot find the words to tell Doris about Jackie’s situation, but clearly wants her mother’s support, as she invites her to visit. The conversation is curtailed because Doris only expects the phone call to last their usual two minutes, another sign of their limited relationship.

Act one, scene ten Place: Margaret’s garden, Raynes Park, London Time: September 1979 Moving forwards in time again, we meet Rosie on the day of her eighth birthday. The tense competition between Margaret and Jackie over Rosie is obvious, but although Rosie is clearly in awe of her cool older sister, she is far closer to Margaret, and always sides with her in the end. The act closes with Jackie tenderly uncovering Margaret’s doll, which Rosie has buried at the beginning of the scene in a gesture of grown-up independence.

Act two Place: The living room of what was Doris’s house, Cheadle Hulme, Manchester Time: December 1982

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All four women arrive at the deserted house that once belonged to Jack and Doris, but has been left to Jackie after Jack’s death: a decision which has hurt Doris and Margaret and caused further tension amongst the family. The house has been empty for the two months since Jack died, and the women are here to sort through its contents and get it ready to sell. Everything about the scene, from the cold snow outside, to the lack of facilities and furniture inside, underlines the discomfort of the Act, and contributes to the rising tempers of the four women.

Act three, scene one Place: Doris’s backyard, Oldham, near Manchester Time: April 1987 Five years since Doris’s move to Oldham, Margaret has come up from London for an impromptu visit. Doris recognizes this as unusual, and suspects this means something is wrong. Margaret is initially frustrated by her mother’s questions, but eventually gives in to them, revealing that her marriage to Ken is disintegrating. The two women share a rare moment of intimacy and solidarity as they consider their imperfect marriages. The scene is underscored by the action of Margaret and Doris carefully planting seedlings.

Act three, scene two Place: Margaret’s office, Croydon, London Time: April 1987 (four days later than Scene One) Rosie bursts into Margaret’s office, invading the dull professionalism of her workplace with the brightness and colour of her holiday clothes and youthful energy. Rosie and Jackie have been travelling all night after a holiday they have taken together in Italy. Rosie is excited by the prospect that she may go to live with Jackie when she has finished school, a

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suggestion that distresses Margaret and causes further tension between her and Jackie.

Act three, scene three Place: The Wasteground Time: Unspecified Back in the wasteground, Jackie, Rosie and Doris are making a childish potion, squabbling about its fantastical ingredients. Margaret is not present. When Jackie reveals to the younger girls that people rot when they die, the other two decide they ‘don’t want to do that to Mum’ any more, but Jackie ominously tells them it is too late. As the scene ends, the ‘shadowy figure of Margaret appears upstage’.

Act three, scene four Place: A hospital in Twickenham, London Time: May 1987 This short scene grows out of the preceding wasteground scene and its theme of death. We hear Margaret’s voice reminiscing about the austerity of her childhood, and trying to find the door to a garden, as she is under the influence of anaesthetic and dying in hospital.

Act three, scene five Place: Margaret’s garden, Raynes Park, London Time: May 1987 (two hours after Scene Four) In between this scene and the last, the long-overdue reveal of Rosie’s parentage has occurred: Rosie has found her own birth certificate in the wake of Margaret’s death. Jackie attempts to justify her actions, but Rosie is unconvinced, punishing Jackie for prioritizing her commitments to her own work and

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life over her relationships with her daughter and, more recently, her dying mother. The scene ends with no resolution between the two.

Act three, scene six Place: The Wasteground Time: Unspecified This scene continues to echo the theme of Margaret’s death and Jackie’s isolation. Margaret and Jackie are playing a children’s game, ‘King of the Golden River’, where Margaret is guarding a line that Jackie is trying to cross. Jackie is sad that the others will not play with her since she went to the boy’s den, but still resists Margaret’s offer to join her in her ‘secret, secret hide’.

Act three, scene seven Place: Doris’s backyard, Oldham, near Manchester Time: September 1987 After all the strain, missed connections, secrets and lies of the play, this scene establishes an atmosphere of calm relaxation and solidarity between the play’s youngest and oldest women: Rosie and Doris. The two are making kites, playing solitaire and talking companionably in the sunny backyard of Doris’s Oldham terrace on Rosie’s sixteenth birthday. We also hear that Rosie and Jackie have salvaged a relationship, and Rosie quotes Jackie’s belief that ‘We mustn’t live in the past’ (89).

Act three, scene eight Place: Oldham Time: May 1923 The last scene in the play takes us furthest into the past, to the day Jack proposed to a youthful Doris. The scene is a

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monologue, in which Doris expresses her excitement for her future as a married woman, as well as recounting her recent promotion to ‘Head of Infants’. She acknowledges that Jack says she will not need to work when she is married, but apart from this foreshadowing (or perhaps we should call this backshadowing) of one of the play’s key tensions, the mood of the scene is hopeful and energetic.

Contexts Production history 1985 1986 1987

1988 1989

1990s

Play first drafted. Rehearsed readings, Paines Plough, London, and North West Playwrights’ Workshop, Manchester. First production, Contact Theatre, Manchester, directed by Brigid Larmour. Keatley considered it ‘extremely important [. . .] that the first production should be directed by a woman’, because of the need for ‘intuitive understanding’ of female experience (Keatley 1994: xxiii). First published. Broadcast on BBC Radio Four. Second production, Royal Court Theatre, London, directed by Michael Attenborough. Through this production, Keatley ‘learned how the text could be directed by a man’. ‘The female unconscious and magic of this play will appear in performance because it is in the play, whether or not it is in the director’, she explains (Keatley 1994: xxiv). Throughout the 1990s, the play received several UK productions, and was also widely translated and performed all over the world, with productions across Europe and as far afield as Singapore, Australia, Israel and the USA .

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2000 2000s

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Chosen by the Royal National Theatre as one of the ‘100 Most Significant Plays of the Twentieth Century’. The play continues to be widely produced in amateur and professional contexts. Recent productions include those at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (2005, directed by Sarah Punshon), the Watford Palace Theatre (2009, directed once again by Brigid Larmour) and The Dukes, Lancaster (2010, directed by Amy Leach).

Time of writing Before 1970, British theatre was a rather ‘male-dominated club’ (Billington 2007: 204). Some female playwrights, such as Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey, 1958) and Ann Jellicoe (The Sport of My Mad Mother, 1958 and The Knack, 1961) made some impact, but are notable as exceptions, rather than the norm. A side-effect of the scarcity of women dramatists was a corresponding lack of satisfying roles for women. Keatley’s drive to create a play that provided more interesting and varied women’s roles was at least partially influenced by her own time as an actress, and her frustration at the limited roles available to her: ‘I had sat in dressing rooms thinking how there were a great many kinds of women who I had not seen in contemporary plays, so I decided I had better write the kind of play I would enjoy watching, or acting in’ (Keatley 1994: xxii). During the 1970s, British theatre became somewhat more open and accessible to women. One key writer who came to prominence during this decade was Caryl Churchill, with plays such as Vinegar Tom (1976) and Cloud Nine (1979), which explore sexual and gender politics from a broadly socialist and feminist perspective. The decade also saw a proliferation of work by feminist or women’s theatre companies, such as the Women’s Theatre Group (established in 1973) and Monstrous Regiment (established in 1975). This meant that there were increased opportunities for women playwrights to have their

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work produced, and that audiences were becoming more used to seeing the stories of women told on stage. Although theatre was still a male-dominated profession and the stories of women were more often told in smaller fringe venues than on main stages, for female playwrights such as Keatley writing in the 1980s, there were at least some role models, and some hope of success. In the 1980s, the work of women continued to become more visible, with plays such as Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982), Andrea Dunbar’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982), Sarah Daniel’s Masterpieces (1983), Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985) and Sharman Macdonald’s When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout (1985). Although we must acknowledge the distinct and individual style of all these writers, it is possible to see Keatley’s play as part of this rising tide of women’s playwriting, in part inspired by the productive energy of the historical moment. Keatley herself believes that by this time a ‘female aesthetic’ had developed in theatre writing, and that her play was part of it (Keatley 1994: xxxiv). Politically, the 1980s were a strained time in Britain. The country had been in recession since 1974, experiencing workers’ strikes and rising unemployment. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher had been elected as Prime Minister. Under her Conservative government, British culture became more materialistic (focused on wealth and acquiring possessions and property) and individualistic (valuing personal achievement over social equality). The gap between the richest and the poorest members of society widened, and Britain’s North-South divide became more pronounced. There was also a growing level of concern about the environment and the potential dangers of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. This is referenced in the play when Rosie tells Jackie that they are ‘doing a Greenham protest outside the physics lab at school’ because ‘[Nuclear] Secrecy kills’ (54). She is referring to the Women’s Peace Camp that gathered at Greenham Common from 1981 as a peaceful protest towards Britain’s nuclear armaments, particularly those stored at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire. In Acts Two and Three, Rosie makes frequent reference to similar political

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concerns, and eventually sets up her own business making ‘Campaign Kites’ for organizations such as Greenpeace (90).

Key historical contexts within the play The lives of the play’s characters span the majority of the twentieth century, and many of the characters’ life choices and experiences are affected by the changing times through which they live. The following periods seem particularly significant within the play:

1940: The Second World War This is the setting for the first part of Act One, Scene Two. It is Christmas Eve, 1940. Over the previous two nights, Manchester has experienced what became known as the ‘Manchester Blitz’, two nights of heavy bombing by the German Luftwaffe, which killed over 600 people and wounded more than 2000.1 Margaret has heard from her friend Gillian that ‘in parts of Manchester there’s nothing left, just bricks squashed’ (12). We hear the ‘sound of an air raid siren’ and the ‘distant rumble of aeroplanes’ (10– 11). Margaret’s bed is made up under the grand piano (thought to be the safest place in the house during an air raid) and Doris and her husband will sleep on the ground floor. Doris hopes they will soon have a proper ‘Anderson shelter’, the corrugated steel air raid shelters, designed by Lord Privy Seal Sir John Anderson to protect the British people from the German bombing raids.

1951: The post-war period Act One, Scene Seven embodies the atmosphere of the post-war period. It is six years since the end of the Second World War, but For more information on these events see the ‘Manchester Blitz’ article on the Imperial War Museum website. Available at: http://archive.iwm.org.uk/server/ show/ConWebDoc.2790, accessed: 3 February 2015. 1

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the country is still heavily in its shadow. Doris, folding her threadbare sheets, exclaims that she will ‘be glad when they put an end to clothes rationing’ (29). This was a procedure implemented to save scarce materials during the war, which disrupted normal production, whilst simultaneously demanding additional supplies for military use. Even when the war ended, the country took several years to return to normal, experiencing clothes rationing until 1949 (making this scene slightly inaccurate), and the rationing of certain types of food until 1954.2 The aftermath of war is also evident in the sound of light aircraft ‘from the base at Padgate’, which signals the continued presence of American airmen, initially stationed in the UK during the war, one of whom Margaret intends to marry.

1969: All You Need is Love The sound of The Beatles’ ‘All You Need in Love’ is the soundtrack to Act One, Scene Four. This symbolizes the new attitudes to sex and relationships that were widely embraced by young people of Jackie’s generation during the 1960s. This is also evident in the dialogue of the scene, in which Margaret is shocked by her daughter’s relaxed response to sleeping with her boyfriend for the first time: ‘It was no big deal’ (20). Jackie is frustrated by her mother’s ‘hang ups’, by which she means her more conservative attitudes to sex (19). Jackie, who is ‘on the pill’, is able to benefit from recent advances in contraception that were not available to her mother as a teenager; the pill only became available as a method of birth control from 1960. Part of Margaret’s objection to what Jackie has done seems to stem from this; she tells Jackie she ‘could have waited’, but when Jackie asks why, her only response is ‘I had to’ (20). For more information about this see the ‘1954: Housewives celebrate end of rationing’ article on the ‘On This Day’ section of the BBC website. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/4/ newsid_3818000/3818563.stm, accessed: 13 March 2015.

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Act One, Scene Six is only two and a half years after Scene Four, but a lot has changed for Jackie. When her mother asks why she has tried to raise Rosie alone, Jackie replies that she ‘wanted to see if our theories worked . . . (Pause.) But when I came back from hospital everyone had cleared out’ (26). It seems that Jackie may be referring back to her ‘free love’ ideology, and its idea that an unmarried mother could be supported by friends in a communal environment, rather than by a partner in a more traditional family set-up. However, Jackie’s friends seem to have let her down, and she is left with the stark reality of singleparenthood and poverty. The bright breeziness of 1969’s ‘flower power’ is wiped out by the cruel winter of 1971.

Things to do 1 Create a timeline of the twentieth century and mark on it when all the scenes in the play take place. You may also want to add in some important historical events, such as the start and end of the Second World War, the moon landing or the election of Margaret Thatcher, to see how they correspond to the scenes. 2 Do a Google image search for each of the years in which scenes from the play are set. Choose an image that you think matches the tone or atmosphere of each scene and explain your reasoning. 3 In pairs or small groups, pick one of the years in which a scene from the play is set and use the library and the internet to research any major national and international events that occurred around that time. Also consider any trends in fashion, music or other elements of popular culture that are associated with that period. Select five items that you would put into a time capsule to represent that year.

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4 Choose one of the scenes from the play that is not discussed in detail above. Read the scene carefully, making a note of any clues that Keatley gives us about the period in which it is set. Remember that these clues may be in the dialogue or the stage directions, and may involve references to production elements, such as costume or music, as well as the things characters discuss.

Contemporary contexts Keatley set the play’s final act in the same year it was first produced. The effect of this was that the play became part historical, part contemporary drama, with parallels drawn between the experiences of women throughout the times depicted, as well as extreme changes and contrasts. The fact that the play is now almost thirty years old (and counting) necessarily means that this dynamic changes. The most recent scenes in the play, set in the 1980s, are now almost as distant to contemporary readers and audiences as the post-war 1950s scenes were to those who first saw the play. But does this mean that the play should now be seen purely as a history play? This is a question I explore with Keatley, as well as with director Brigid Larmour and teacher Louisa Warde, within their interviews in the Behind the Scenes section of this book.

Things to do

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f Rosie had a daughter of her own, she could be about your age. Do you think things have got better for women in the thirty years since the play was written? Use the following prompts as stimulus for discussion, in small groups, or as a class:

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How are your choices and opportunities different from or similar to those of the characters in the play?

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What do you want for your future, in terms of home and family, and work and career?

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Do women share the same career opportunities as men? Are women expected to give up or reduce their work to raise children?

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How have the expectations of men, and the expectations placed on men, changed?

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What political changes need to occur before men and women have equal opportunities and choices with regards to having a career and raising a family?

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Themes Feminism, the female and the male Like many female writers of her generation, Keatley has shown some ambivalence towards the labelling of her work as feminist. However, this seems more connected to the problematic ways in which feminism is sometimes defined and represented in the media, than it is an actual rejection of the term. In fact, Keatley admits: I think it is a feminist play. The problem with the word feminism is it’s very rarely defined by the people who want to call themselves feminists. [. . .] When I said that the play wasn’t feminist what I meant was that I didn’t want it to be limited to the idea that it’s politically, socially angry in the way that ‘feminist’ has come to mean. I like the word ‘female’. It feels like something far older than feminism. [I]f you can start to make theatre in which not just the verbal

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language, but the physical language, the imagery, the pace, the subtext, are true to ourselves, then that’s ‘female’ if you like, rather than ‘feminist’. in Stephenson and Langridge 1997: 75

KEATLEY

With her suggestion that the play is ‘female’ more than it is ‘feminist’, there is a sense that Keatley is invoking certain concepts connected to ‘essentialist’ feminism. This is a type of feminism that suggests women are naturally connected to, and gifted with, certain processes and qualities. It celebrates potential differences, which have sometimes been perceived as women’s weaknesses, and instead sees them as strengths. Other types of feminism find these views problematic because they consider it unhelpful and restrictive to suggest men and women are innately or naturally different. Essentialist feminist perspectives tend to stress women’s connection to natural processes, such as birth and menstruation, and through these to the natural world, sometimes invoking the idea of a ‘mother earth’. This attitude is visible within My Mother Said: Keatley suggests that ‘earth is the base element of the play’ and that key moments in the play are signalled by contact with the earth, such as when Rosie buries Margaret’s doll, or Doris and Margaret plant geraniums. In contrast to this, some of the spaces in the play are presented as being more masculine: I deliberately set the crisis moments of female choice – child versus career – in the most male-created environments: Jack’s house, Jackie’s council-flat and Margaret’s office. The environment makes it harder for the women to say what they want and feel; and it actually represents the masculine side of the emotional choice that Margaret and Jackie are trying to make. KEATLEY

1994: xxviii

The contrasts between the masculine and the feminine are also underscored by the sound effects in the play:

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The sounds in the play: lawnmower, traffic, an ice-cream van, Ken’s car horn, two male radio announcements and four male popular songs, are mostly mechanical, and seem to me to represent the offstage world of men. [. . .] There are only two organic sounds in the play; cats wailing in the wasteground, and babies crying. They evoke female magic. KEATLEY

1994: xxix–xxx

‘The personal is political’ One statement associated with the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s is ‘the personal is political’. By saying this, women meant that the everyday lives of women, which had often been restricted to domestic duties and had rarely made a big impact on mainstream politics, should be regarded as political, in the sense that they are closely connected to and affected by social issues. We sometimes talk about ‘big P Politics’, and ‘little p politics’ to differentiate between the Politics conducted by governments and political parties, and the politics continually conducted by everyone in their interactions with one another. The statement also asserted the fact that women could begin processes of social and political change, starting by examining the restrictions and persecutions they experienced in their everyday personal lives.3 Keatley’s play taps into this movement, hoping ‘to show how hugely dramatic the “ordinary” lives of women have been’ (Keatley 1994: xxii). When asked in an interview whether she thought My Mother Said was a political play, Keatley was clear in her response: ‘Yes. Because it’s about how people live and what choices they make and what possibilities there are.’ She goes on to acknowledge the tendency for the political aspects of women’s lives and women’s writing to be under-recognized, as ‘women’s work is

3 This attitude is visible today, for example, in Laura Bates’s Everyday Sexism Project. See: Bates, Laura (2014) Everyday Sexism. London, Simon & Schuster.

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not yet seen as a metaphor in the sense that if we go to see Hamlet we don’t think, “This is just an adolescent play for men who feel a bit lost.” We think, “This play is a metaphor for us all”’ (Keatley in Stephenson and Langridge 1997: 73).

Women’s choices and opportunities As referenced above, Keatley considered that depicting the choices women make, and are able to make, was key to the political dimension of her play. A reality, which has been frequently highlighted by feminist movements, is that, historically, the life choices available to women have been much more restricted than the life choices available to their male counterparts. For example, women were once seen as possessions, first of their fathers, and then of their husbands, who would often be chosen by their fathers. Women’s educational and career options were also severely limited, both by attitudes concerning what it was or was not considered appropriate for a woman to do, and because women were often expected to give up work when they got married, or to raise children. Keatley was well aware of this history and that she ‘had many more choices than women in previous generations’ (Keatley 1994: xxii). She set her work across the time period it spans because she considered that ‘these are the four generations in which women’s lives have changed more radically than ever before. [. . .] Women’s lives had changed so little until the beginning of the twentieth century; then there was the effect of two world wars, contraception and everything else’ (Keatley in Stephenson and Langridge 1997: 79). The increasing levels of choice available to each generation of women are clearly evident in the play but, Keatley suggests, there is a cost: each ‘choice’ has an element of sacrifice: Doris chooses her own husband, but is expected to give up her job as soon as she is married; Margaret is able to work and raise a family, but her career prospects are quite limited; Jackie achieves a high level of success as an artist, but only by relinquishing motherhood. Although, in some respects, each generation achieves more

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than the previous, there is also an extent to which the reality of each woman’s choices still fails to meet the level of her expectations: ‘You expected too much’, Doris tells Margaret, ‘So did I. And Jackie expects even more’ (70). One of the problems at the heart of their frustrated expectations is that the women’s choices are still limited by the fact that many of them seem mutually exclusive. Consequently, the women in the play struggle to occupy multiple identities successfully. Margaret is concerned by the mixing of her personal and professional lives. When Rosie turns up unexpectedly at her office in Act Three, Scene Two, she asks ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ (71), and tells her ‘You’d better get out of sight before Mr Reece arrives at nine’ (72). As Rosie is trying to tell her about the holiday she has had with Jackie, Margaret continues to deal with her post, causing Rosie to exclaim: ‘Will you stop opening letters for a minute’ (73). However, after some time Margaret seems to soften to the presence of her family in her office. The stage directions tell us she is ‘pleased’ when she recognizes, ‘It’s funny, hearing “Mummy” in this place’ (76). For a moment, we glimpse the possibility of a less rigid, more fulfilling combination of work and family life. Jackie too has to separate her personal history from her work persona, as evidenced in her attitude to work wear: ‘I used to wear suits, when I first started my job’, she admits, and still feels she has to change from a ‘beach dress’ into a smarter dress for an important meeting. When Jackie recalls a memory of flying a kite as a child, Margaret says, ‘I thought you’d wiped out that little girl’, and Jackie agrees, ‘So did I’. As with most aspects of the play, Rosie’s situation is presented as different and more hopeful: ‘Rosie won’t’, continues Jackie, ‘She’ll have kites in her office’ (77). However, even Rosie carries some of the prejudices of the older generations, suggesting that Jackie’s career is more acceptable than Margaret’s, not only because it is more important, but because ‘Jackie’s different, she’s got no kids’ (48). Not even Rosie can see a situation in which a mother might also have a high-flying career.

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Acts Two and Three offer some hope that there are growing work and educational opportunities available to mothers. In Act Two, Jackie suggests that she could take Rosie in the holidays as she could ‘time share with Sandra at the City Art Gallery’, who has two small children (51), and in Act Three, Scene Seven, Doris has been impressed by a bright woman with ‘two babbies’ who attends her evening class on Women’s Literature (90). It is important to Keatley that the examination of women’s choices should be made without passing judgement: ‘I wanted to write a play that laid down four different lives, neither better nor worse, to find out what is possible today.’ None of the four characters are intended to represent the ‘right’ way, or even a better way, to be a woman. ‘I still don’t know what kind of woman to be’, admits Keatley (1994: xxii). She also wants the play to acknowledge that women’s choices only increase because of the battles fought by previous women; ‘the debt which [each] generation owes to the previous one’ (xxiii).

Motherhood Very much related to the theme above, the play explores women’s complex relationships towards motherhood. All the women express ambivalence, if not downright negativity towards the idea of having children at some point in the play. Rosie says she is ‘never having any children’ in Act Three, Scene Five (84). In Act One, Scene Seven, Margaret sounds equally sure that she is ‘not going to have a family, babies and all that’ (30), and even Doris reveals, ‘What makes you think I wanted children?’ (31). Ironically, Jackie is the only one to never make such a categorical statement. However, the women’s reluctance to have children is often countered by an acknowledgement that they do not have much choice in the matter, due to a range of factors, from the pressure of men and/ or society at large, to the inadequacy of contraception, and the biological imperative: ‘the desire [. . .] for little arms reaching up and clinging round your neck’ (30–1).

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Contained within the theme of motherhood are a number of sub-themes, such as the issues of unmarried motherhood and abandoning motherhood. These themes are most evidently illustrated by Jackie’s experience. Falling pregnant to a married man whilst she is still a teenager herself, Jackie struggles to cope financially and emotionally, and her situation is exacerbated by the disappointment and disapproval of her family and the society in which she lives. In the early 1970s, there was still a definite stigma attached to unmarried motherhood. Although some advancements had been made in attitudes towards sexual and women’s liberation and, as Jackie remembers, there were ‘books that came out that winter’ instructing people on ‘how to succeed as a single working mother’; these ideas were ‘fairytales’ compared to the reality of her isolating experience (84). Jackie’s decision to give up her daughter allows Keatley to explore what she saw as ‘the biggest taboo; a mother disowning her child’ (Keatley 1994: xxiii). Jackie’s experience is echoed by the discovery, in Act Two, that her own great-grandmother was unmarried, making her grandmother Doris illegitimate. Doris remembers the neighbours gossiping about her, but acknowledges that her situation was actually ‘more common than they put on those documentaries’ about the era. She attributes her hardworking attitude to her unorthodox childhood and her mother’s insistence ‘Work hard and you will rise like bread’ (59). This complicates our assumption that women’s choices always increase over time, as Jackie feels forced into giving up her illegitimate daughter for a better life, in a way that Doris’s mother did not.

Mother–daughter relationships Also heavily related to the theme of motherhood, is the exploration of mother–daughter relationships. Keatley decided to focus her play on this dynamic to highlight the way we pass things – both positive and negative – down the generations, and

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because she believed ‘this relationship of love and jealousy most influences the choices a daughter makes’ (xxiii). There are a number of key aspects within her depiction of this relationship:

1. Jealousy and resentment The play depicts a level of resentment directed towards each generation from the generation before. Doris resents her daughter Margaret’s increased opportunities to maintain a career and have a family, so she criticizes these choices, even suggesting in Act One, Scene Five that Margaret’s miscarriage is a result of her trying to combine work and child-bearing. Similarly, in Act One, Scene Four, we see that Margaret resents the increased sexual freedom Jackie can enjoy due to choices in contraception that were not available to Margaret’s generation. This is evident in Margaret’s implication that the main reason Jackie should have ‘waited’ to sleep with her boyfriend was because she, and women of her generation, had had to. A side-effect of this resentment is that each woman burdens her daughter with her own frustrated ambitions and expectations. A key line that exposes this theme falls in Act One, Scene Six, when Margaret insists that Jackie has ‘got to go further than me – and Rosie too. (Quietly.) Otherwise . . . what’s it been worth’ (28). Margaret acknowledges the limitations that have been placed on her life as a woman, but simultaneously saddles Jackie and the infant Rosie with the weighty responsibility of making up for her frustrations. This pattern of resentment and expectation is a major factor that damages the relationships between the women in the play. One scene in which this resentment is particularly evident is Act Two, in which Doris and Margaret are angry with Jackie over Jack’s decision to leave Jackie his house. Doris is bitter because she feels her ‘sixty years of housewifery counted for nothing’, whereas Jack noticed and admired Jackie’s ‘sort of work’: her painting. Margaret feels similarly resentful that ‘a job was never a good enough excuse for me’ and that ‘Father disapproved’ of her working. Rosie, with a child’s tactlessness,

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makes the situation worse by belittling Margaret’s work as ‘only typing’ and positioning this against Jackie’s exciting career: ‘you have to travel lots, and your work’s the most important thing’ (48). However, Margaret and Doris are clearly behaving unfairly in directing their resentment towards Jackie. This demonstrates the negative energy that is created when women blame each other for problems that have, in fact, been caused by men. Only Rosie seems aware of this, challenging Margaret and Doris: ‘I think you’re both being rude to Jackie. She can’t help what Granddad did’ (47).

2. Competition All the mothers in the play compete with one another over their relationships with their children or grandchildren. At first this is evident in Doris and Margaret’s relationships with Jackie. In Act One, Scene Five, when Jackie spoils her painting by knocking the paint pot over it, Margaret tries to rescue it, but Doris takes it from her, insisting that Jackie has done it for Jack. This first element of competition between a mother and grandmother foreshadows the much greater level of competition Margaret and Jackie will have over Rosie. The competition over Rosie is clearly established in Act One, Scene Ten, where Margaret and Jackie are brought together to celebrate Rosie’s eighth birthday. Margaret’s first dig is to ask Jackie how long it has been since she was last here. She cuts Jackie off from revealing what she used to wish for when blowing out the candles and the two then argue over whether the wish should be made then, or when cutting the cake. Their squabbling is so apparent that Rosie scolds them, ‘Oh stop it, you two!’ (40). This competition over Rosie never diminishes. In Act Three, Scene Two, rocked by the news that Rosie wants to move to Manchester to live with Jackie after her exams, Margaret desperately tries to put barriers in the way. Rosie may be capable with Jackie when ‘It’s an adventure’, but at home her bedroom is ‘like a junkyard’, Margaret insists. Jackie seems proud of Rosie’s creativity, but Margaret dismisses

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her as ‘full of crazy ideas’ (75). She is clearly resentful that Rosie might take after her artistic birth mother, rather than the organized secretary grandmother that has raised her. Jackie is desperate to think that the new potential in her relationship with Rosie can make up for the years she has lost, but Margaret is quick to disillusion her: ‘Years and years and years you’ve lost, Jackie. Birthdays and first snowmen and learning to ride a bicycle and new front teeth. You can’t pull them back. [. . .] Those are my years. [. . .] Treats, she’s had with you. A day here and there. That never fooled her. But I let it fool you’ (77).

3. Secrets and lies The Guardian theatre critic, Michael Billington, insightfully pinpoints one of the play’s key themes in his review of the 1989 Royal Court production: The big lie obviously concerns the hushing-up of Rosie’s origins, but it is compounded by a whole series of lesser lies: the suppression of Doris’s own illegitimacy, of Margaret’s miscarriage and of the fact that her husband has deserted her. Ms Keatley has realised that the characteristic sound of English family life is of people telling each other evasive untruths. BILLINGTON

1989

Some of the lies are created to smooth over social embarrassment, others are a byproduct of the more general failure to connect and communicate between mother and daughter, evidenced throughout the play. Often the lies are not secrets at all, but things the women only think they have kept from one another. For example, in Act two, Doris tells Rosie about her illegitimate origins, claiming Margaret does not know about this, when previously in the scene, we have heard Margaret tell Jackie the same apparent secret. However, the secret carries a different weight for Jackie, who is furious that Margaret never told her this before, as the history of unmarried

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motherhood in the family might have affected her attitude towards raising Rosie alone.

4. Repeating cycles and breaking free During the course of the play, we witness repeatedly how each generation can pick up the same destructive and restrictive ideas and behaviours as the one before, enacting the same treatment on their daughters that they suffered from their mothers. This theme is evident in many scenes, but is illustrated particularly clearly in Act One, Scene Ten: the last scene in the play’s first act. Here the cyclical passage of time is underscored by the event of Rosie’s birthday, and visually represented by the ritual of lighting and blowing out birthday cake candles to mark the passing of another year. However, a potential rupture to this cycle is presented at the very beginning of this scene. Rosie appears on stage for the first time (since she was represented as a baby by a basket of blankets), and proceeds to bury the doll, Suky, who originally belonged to Margaret in Scene Two and Jackie talks about playing with in Scene Five. Rosie says she is burying Suky because ‘Eight is too old for dolls’, but the act has a symbolic function beyond the simple narrative of growing up. By burying the doll that belonged to her grandmother, who she believes to be her mother, Rosie is enacting a small rebellion towards her. ‘I couldn’t care less if mum sees me doing this now’, she boasts (38). She also seems to be subconsciously re-enacting her own history of abandonment as a baby, explaining, ‘I was going to give you away to the Toy Collection at School, d’you know that? Mummies give their babies away sometimes. They do’ (39). But by burying Suky, rather than just giving her away, Rosie’s symbolic break with her past is much more pronounced. The act also foreshadows Margaret’s death, later in the play. At the end of the scene, Jackie notices the freshly dug earth and uncovers Suky. The scene, and the first act of the play, end with Jackie alone on stage with the doll, which is naked, except for one of the red socks that belonged to baby Rosie in Scene Six:

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‘Jackie takes the other red sock from her pocket. As she puts the sock on the doll the lights fade to blackout, so that as she raises the doll to her cheek she is only just visible’ (43). By digging up the buried doll, and by still having the sock from Scene Six, Jackie demonstrates that she is not ready to shake herself free from the past. Rosie reiterates her break from the restrictions of the other women when, in Act two, she tells the spirit of her dead grandfather: ‘I’m not scared of you, Granddad. It’s the others who are. You didn’t get me’ (44).4 When Jackie suggests she could make a banner that says ‘Sorry Mummy’, Rosie tells her she ‘should stop that sort of thing now, or you never will. You should hear Mum’s “I’m sorry” voice on the phone to Gran’ (54). When Jackie asks, ‘Don’t you worry about what Mummy thinks?’ Rosie’s answer is disillusioning: ‘I worry about nuclear war, and not getting a job, and whether Mr Walsh the physics teacher fancies me’. The guilt Jackie carries with her influences the way she thinks about everything. For example, she believes her grandfather has left her the house, not as an act of admiration, but as one of revenge: ‘I’d escaped. Families. – Nearly. He’s made me responsible for you all now’, she explains (54). Rosie, without Jackie’s guilt, interprets the situation differently: ‘You are thick. He left you the money so you can open a gallery of your own’. Without the restrictions imposed by family responsibilities, Rosie would spend the money on a baseball jacket and the charity Greenpeace. The play’s penultimate scene creates a small utopia that is achievable once the women have let go of their restrictive and damaging repetitions and found a new pattern. The new, ‘sisterly’ relationship established between Doris and Rosie also seems to extend beyond them: Doris recounts attending an evening class in Women’s Literature, where she has been impressed by a woman who ‘doesn’t look the sort to even open a book. But she’s quite the best’ (90). Interestingly, this woman It is worth pointing out that Rosie is not referring to anything more sinister than the way restrictions and oppressions are passed through families here.

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is also referenced as having ‘two babbies’, perhaps hinting at the growing potential for women to productively combine motherhood with further education and work.

‘Absent’ fathers There are no male characters in the play. However, the men who affect the characters’ lives are far from absent from the text. A page into Act One, Scene Two, Doris resorts to threatening Margaret, ‘I shall have to tell your father’ (9). In Act One, Scene Five, we can hear Doris’s husband/Margaret’s father Jack mowing the lawn. Doris shouts offstage to him, asking him to join them for tea, but he does not. Margaret explains that her husband, Ken, will not be joining them either; he is filling the car with petrol. Ken waits in the car again in Act One, Scene Six, as Margaret takes Rosie away from a distraught Jackie: a decision that suggests that, however emotionally unavailable the women in the play can be, the men are more so. The most extreme example of the absent father is Rosie’s father, Graham, with whom Jackie has had a brief relationship. Although she insists he loved her and Rosie, the facts she describes paint a different picture. Graham, she tells us, ‘couldn’t be there the day you were born’, and later moved house without informing Jackie. The closest he has been to Rosie since her birth seems to have been a time Jackie took Rosie to the park and saw him ‘across the lake’ buying his other children ice cream (83–4).

Characters Because of the unconventional narrative structure of the play, discussed in more detail in the section on Dramatic Technique, each character should be seen as having two development arcs. The first is the straightforward, chronological story of their life, from birth, through childhood and adulthood, and in some cases to their death. The second is the sequence in which

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the play’s structure reveals to us their story. When reading these character profiles, it is important to remember both these dimensions. You will need to develop an understanding of how Keatley constructs each character, as much as, if not more than, an understanding of what each character is like, their history, relationships and behaviour.

Doris Partington Born in Oldham, near Manchester, in 1900, Doris is the daughter of an unmarried mother. She briefly works as a teacher, before giving this up to marry businessman and amateur artist Jack Bradley in 1923. The couple live in Cheadle Hulme, where they raise their only child, Margaret, born in 1931. After Jack’s death, Doris returns to Oldham to live, where she is later joined by her great-granddaughter, Rosie. Setting aside the wasteground/child scenes for the moment, we first meet Doris as a forty-year-old woman in Act One, Scene Two. This scene clearly establishes Doris’s difficult relationship with her daughter Margaret (we see Margaret make several attempts to relate to her mother, all of which are dismissed by Doris) and hints at the problems in her relationship with her husband Jack (Margaret inadvertently reveals that her parents sleep in separate beds). These aspects of the scene are discussed in more detail in the chapter on Writing About the Play. The strain between Doris and Margaret remains constantly visible throughout the play, although it is often tempered with Doris’s evident care for her daughter. However, her attempts to show this often come across as fussy and unwelcome. For example, in Act One, Scene Five, a sixty-one-year-old Doris tries to mother a thirty-year-old Margaret (who has recently suffered a miscarriage), seeing that she has a chair to sit down on, suggesting she take iron tablets, and generally showing concern for her health. It is clear that Margaret is keen to leave Doris’s house and company, finding multiple excuses as to why

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they cannot stay long. Later in the scene, Margaret does open up to Doris about her miscarriage, confessing, ‘Mother, I thought I didn’t want it, till I lost it’. It is notable that this line, directly addressed to Doris, is followed by a pause that Doris does not fill. As in Scene Two, we see Margaret attempt to make an emotional connection with her mother, and Doris fail to return it. When Doris does, several lines later, respond to the subject of Margaret’s loss, it is not to connect or empathise, but to scold unhelpfully, ‘If you hadn’t been so hasty to get that temping job, you would never have lost the baby’ (23). Act One, Scene Seven, which takes us back to the year before Margaret’s marriage, further underlines Doris’s inability to respond to Margaret’s emotional needs. This is particularly evident when Margaret tells her mother she is in love, only for Doris to respond with a comment about the weather (30). (This moment sheds an interesting light on Margaret telling Jackie to talk to her about her boyfriend as they go round the garden centre, as we hear about in Act One, Scene Four). However, the scene also reveals that the tendency towards emotional dismissal now works both ways between the two women. Towards the end of the scene, Doris opens up to Margaret more than we have ever seen before, acknowledging her own ambivalence towards giving up her career for family life. She spells out the lack of options available to her generation: ‘There wasn’t any choice, then; so I don’t know whether it was my need – to love him, if you know what I mean . . . or his desire – for a son’ (31). Disappointingly, though perhaps not surprisingly given her upbringing, Margaret responds to her mother’s confession, first with shock, then by changing the subject kindly, but inadequately. The problems in Jack and Doris’s relationship are also developed through further scenes. Act One, Scene Five reemphasises the disconnect in their marriage, when Doris calls offstage to ask Jack to have tea with her and his daughter and granddaughter, but receives no other answer than Jack restarting the lawnmower and continuing his chore. In Act Two, we learn that Doris spent her married evenings playing

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solitaire, ‘while Jack read the papers’ (66), and in Act Three, Scene One, she reveals that Jack ‘stopped “wanting me”, many years ago’ (70). Towards the end of Jack’s life, things were no better, with Doris suggesting Jack’s disinterest in her and her housewifery were deliberately calculated to hurt her: ‘I tried so hard, even in those last few years . . . Something nourishing and not difficult to chew . . . The tray pushed aside on your bed. You did that deliberately, didn’t you?’ (65) Doris’s closer and more constructive relationships are with her granddaughter Jackie and great-granddaughter Rosie. Her closeness to Jackie is established in Act One, Scenes Two and Five, in which Jackie has been staying with Doris whilst Margaret recovers from her miscarriage. In these scenes, Doris is noticeably softer and more indulgent in her dealings with nine-year-old Jackie than she was with Margaret as a child in Act One, Scene Two. In Act Two, we see a continuation of the close relationship between Doris and Jackie and learn that Jackie spent the Christmas after she gave up Rosie with Doris and Jack. However, Doris is also frustrated with Jackie for not having asserted her right to Rosie. Act Two also shows us the beginnings of the good relationship between Doris and Rosie, which becomes particularly evident in the final scene of the play. We see a mischievous, childlike side to Doris, as she and Rosie bond over their place as ‘outsiders’ to the pair of capable, adult women who are trying to organize the task at hand. Because of their youth and age, respectively, both Rosie and Doris are treated as something between a nuisance and an invalid: Doris Rosie Doris Rosie

They work too hard. You shouldn’t wind them up. You should be helping them. They’d only say I was more trouble. (57)

Throughout much of her life, Doris has been heavily confined by established routines, conventions, and a fear of what others may think of her. In Act One, Scene Nine, she rings

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Margaret because Margaret is two minutes late phoning her for their six o’clock conversation, and rings off after two minutes even though Margaret is clearly trying to tell her something, because that’s how long they usually speak for. In Act Two, she is anxious about her garden; that Jackie may have reversed the van over her beloved lily of the valley, and that the next people who move into the house will think ‘Jack and I didn’t know about roses’, as they have not been able to prune them at the right time (46). However, as she grows older, Doris seems to become more open about her regrets and resentments, telling Jackie, ‘I never did ask for what I wanted. Resentment is a terrible thing, Jackie. You don’t want to be resenting somebody at the end of your life’ (55), and Rosie that ‘When you’re old . . . if you’re rude . . . they just think your mind is going. (Pause.) They never understand that it’s anger’ (58). Having seen Doris’s adult life played out, the final scene of the play gives us a glimpse of her at her most youthful: a twenty-three year old woman, who has just received a marriage proposal from Jack. Her youthful enthusiasm and naivety provide a moving contrast to the rather emotionally stilted woman we have seen throughout the play.

Things to do

G

o through the text, picking out examples of words or phrases that Doris uses that signal her age and generation. Write a glossary to make sure you know what all these words and phrases mean.

Margaret Bradley Born in Cheadle Hulme in 1931, Margaret is the only daughter of Doris and Jack Bradley. In 1951, she marries American airman Ken Metcalfe, moving to Raynes Park in London, and

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has her daughter Jackie in 1952. After Jackie’s birth, she continues to work as a secretary for a firm that sells microwaves. She dies of stomach cancer in 1987. Setting apart the wasteground scenes for now, we first meet Margaret as a nine-year-old girl, sheltering under a grand piano, during a wartime air-raid. As previously discussed, this scene establishes the difficult relationship Margaret will always have with her mother, in particular their emotional disconnect. Initially, Margaret appears to have a closer relationship with her daughter Jackie than her mother Doris; in Act One, Scene Five, we see them holding hands and hugging. However, in Act One, Scene Four, we hear that Margaret, like Doris, has a tendency to ignore her daughter’s attempts to connect and talk with her. When Jackie had tried to confide in her about her intention to sleep with her boyfriend, Margaret did not give her the time and space to do so, instead suggesting she talk about it whilst they went round the garden centre (19). In Act One, Scene Five, it is revealed that Margaret has had a miscarriage. Doris suggests that this is the fault of Margaret working too hard whilst pregnant, but we assume that this is Doris’s prejudice, rather than a medical diagnosis. Elsewhere in the play are many more references to Margaret’s career focus. In Act One, Scene Seven, where we see her as a young, not yet married woman with all her dreams and ambitions intact, she tells her mother she wants ‘a proper job’, and won’t ‘waste’ her life running a home. Margaret, at this stage in her life, is adamant that she is ‘not going to have a family, babies and all that’ (30). She might not, as Jackie will, have access to a contraceptive pill, but she knows there are ‘THINGS you can get’ to prevent pregnancy. However, compare the naivety with which Margaret alludes to contraceptive options she is clearly not sure about, with the confident way Jackie deals with the matter in Act One, Scene Four. Like Doris, Margaret is very concerned with her family’s image and with keeping up appearances. In Act One, Scene Nine, she lies to Doris that Jackie has not been in touch for so long because she has been revising for her exams, rather than

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admit the truth about Rosie’s birth, even though it is clear this pretence cannot be maintained very much longer, now Margaret is to raise Rosie. At the end of the phone call, she says to herself: ‘Jackie, what are you doing to me . . .?’ (38), as though the difficulty of covering up Jackie’s problems is the most painful thing about the situation. At times it is difficult not to see Margaret’s character as cruel and petulant. When, in Act One, Scene Ten, Jackie acknowledges that Rosie ‘doesn’t need me, does she?’ Margaret simply replies ‘No’ (42). In the same scene, she is disproportionately angry about Jackie’s offer of financial support, and in Act Two, she is annoyed by Jackie’s objection to the fact there is sugar in the thermos of tea she has brought for them, complaining unreasonably that Jackie has ‘no sense of compromise’ (45). But perhaps Margaret is not so much unkind as firm and realistic. She tells Jackie she worries about her, and expresses her concern that it would be nice if Jackie ‘found someone’ so as not to end up lonely. This style of mothering – overly fussy, but not compassionate enough – is very similar to that which she experiences from her own mother Doris, particularly in Act One, Scene Five. Act Two reveals the first signs of Margaret’s declining health. Margaret dismisses the ‘spasm[s] of pain’ she is suffering as menopausal cramps. Jackie, who is more streetwise, knows ‘It shouldn’t do that to you’, and tells Margaret she should see a doctor. Margaret puts barriers in the way of all Jackie’s offers and suggestions: she works all the hours the doctors is open; she couldn’t let Jackie look after Rosie in the school holidays because all her school friends are in London. Instead of accepting Jackie’s support, she takes offence at the suggestion she might be struggling to cope (51). But although Margaret’s inability to accept support from Jackie helps to perpetuate her own problems, she is also placed in a difficult position by those around her. It is implied that her husband is (practically and morally) unsupportive of her decision to take an evening computer course, and even Rosie considers that Margaret has ‘messed things up’ by doing this (53).

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Act Three continues to show the strains on Margaret and her failing health. When she visits Doris, in the act’s opening scene, she is so distracted by the rest of her life that she can barely respond to Doris’s conversation. When Doris asks what is wrong, she becomes intensely defensive, objecting to her mother’s concern, and turning her every comment into an argument: Doris What’s wrong, Margaret. Margaret What do you mean, what’s wrong? Doris You’re upset. Margaret I’m probably upset because you’re accusing me of being upset. Doris (smoothly) I’m not accusing you. Don’t take umbrage. Margaret Really Mother. [. . .] Can’t I even have a normal conversation with my own Mother? Doris I don’t know, dear. Margaret What do you mean, you don’t know? (Pause.) And don’t call me ‘dear’! (69) Eventually, Margaret reveals that she has separated from her husband Ken. She blames herself for her husband’s decision to leave her: ‘It’s all my fault. He loved me, Mother . . . but he didn’t want to share me. [. . .] Ken married a wife, not a working mother’ (70). In Margaret’s moment of vulnerability, she opens up to her mother and the two share one of their most intimate exchanges. Margaret’s dying thoughts are interesting to note: much of her final monologue is about the constraints of her childhood, its lack of privacy, emotional repression and austerity. However, alongside this, she returns to some of her essential life questions and choices: ‘When I have babies they will be called Sugar and Spice’, ‘What happens when you die?’ She is also trying to find the door to a garden (81). Another moment in the play that suggests that Margaret is a slightly more complex character than we might have thought comes in Act One, Scene Four, when, after Jackie has stormed off, Margaret reveals that once, since her marriage to Ken, she dated another man.

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Things to do 1 Using the first-person perspective, write a diary entry for Margaret that expands on what we know about her encounter with the man who took her out for dinner and oysters. Think about how Margaret might be feeling directly after this event, in relation to her own experiences and her concerns about those around her. Next, write a brief (100 word) commentary, explaining your choices of style and content within the diary entry. 2 Improvise an off-text scene between Margaret and Jackie at the garden centre. Jackie’s objective is to try and talk to her mother about her plans to have sex with her boyfriend for the first time. Margaret’s objective is to find the right type of geranium. These objectives should work at odds with one another to create tension in the scene. Working with your improvisation partner or on your own, write a brief piece of dialogue based on the ideas that emerge from this improvisation. 3 In pairs, improvise the phone call between Jackie and Margaret where Jackie rings out of the blue to ask Margaret to take Rosie. What has the improvisation revealed about your understanding of the two characters?

Jackie Metcalfe Born in Raynes Park, London, in 1952, Jackie is the only natural daughter of Margaret and Ken Metcalfe. She moves to Manchester to study art at a ‘Polytechnic’ (the old name for a type of university that often specialized in teaching more practical subjects), but falls pregnant to a married man, giving birth to Rosie in 1971. Three months after Rosie’s birth, she gives her to Margaret to raise, later resuming her studies and

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becoming a successful artist and gallery owner. She never marries or has any more children. We first meet Jackie, as a nine-year-old girl in the second part of Act One, Scene Two, and again in Scene Five, set later the same day. In Scene Five, Jackie has painted a picture using her grandfather Jack’s grown-up paints: the first sign we see of her future career as an artist. As a child, Jackie seems close to both her mother and grandmother, but as she grows up her relationship with her mother deteriorates, and the two struggle to connect, partly because Jackie’s position within the 1960s ‘free love’ generation is alien to Margaret’s more restrictive upbringing. Jackie’s distance from respectable convention – and from her family – continues to be evident after her move to Manchester. In Act One, Scene Nine, we learn that she has not been to visit her grandparents Doris and Jack (who also live in Manchester) for a year, presumably since she got pregnant. We also know she did not contact her parents for the first three months after Rosie’s birth, suggesting her experiences have shut her off from her family. Jackie’s difficult and distant relationship with her family continues after Margaret takes Rosie on. When Jackie arrives for Rosie’s eighth birthday in Act One, Scene Ten, it is revealed that it is one year and four months since her last visit (40). Unsurprisingly, Jackie finds it hard to connect with Rosie as much as she yearns to, trying to make up for this by bringing expensive gifts and birthday cakes. Her relationship with Margaret is made even tenser through their competition over Rosie. Jackie watches intently as Margaret and Rosie embrace, and painfully acknowledges, ‘She doesn’t need me, does she?’ (42). Act Two reveals that Jackie’s Manchester flat contains a room she calls ‘Rosie’s room’, which is ‘always ready’, but Jackie’s evident desire to see more of Rosie seems at odds with the fact that Rosie tells us ‘She hardly ever visits us’ (48). Jackie tells Doris that she could not ask for Rosie back because ‘Mummy’s got so much to – it’s not a good time for her’, but there is also a sense that Jackie is not really prepared to make the necessary commitment to Rosie, however much she also longs for her (55).

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Her past experiences have also damaged her ability to forge new relationships. Since Jackie gave up Rosie, we hear she has had a relationship with a man called Simon, but had to end things between them because Simon wanted children. For a while, Jackie had ‘tried to believe I could start again’, before realizing this was impossible, as she ‘just kept dreaming about Rosie’ (42). As an adult, Jackie is presented as brusque and organized. This is particularly evident in Act Two, where she is continually trying to motivate everyone for the house-clearing task at hand. However, there is an implication that her capable ‘cando’ attitude is somewhat hollow, as emphasized when she suggests they can unfreeze a frozen rose that Rosie has found in the garden. ‘Even you can’t organise roses to come alive’, insists Rosie (45). It does not seem insignificant that Jackie is so determined to save the flower that shares its name with her daughter. As with many parts of the play, there is more in the subtext of this moment than first meets the eye. At the beginning of Act Three, Jackie takes Rosie on holiday to Italy, which we do not see, but hear about from all the characters. Jackie treats Rosie with a mixture of sophistication and attempted mothering, taking her to posh restaurants and all-night carnivals, but looking out for her protectively when she attracts unwanted male attention and, as Rosie tells Margaret, ‘trying so hard to be like you’ (72). Rosie says she ‘can’t think of anyone less like a mother’ than Jackie, and also describes her as ‘restless’, remembering how ‘we spent a whole day trekking round museums but she could never find the picture she wanted’ (73). When the truth is finally revealed to Rosie, Jackie stresses the economic and material reasons behind her ‘choice’ to give her up, detailing the ‘cold winter’ and frequent ‘power cuts’ she was faced with after Rosie’s birth, and the isolation in which she experienced these things. When we last see Jackie, she is desperately trying to connect with a hurt and furious Rosie, seemingly to no avail but, by the play’s end, we hear she is beginning to find some peace. Her relationship with Rosie is healing and she is in a relationship with a man called Andy, which is serious enough for them to have ‘bought a duvet’ together (87).

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Things to do 1 Write a letter from Jackie to Rosie, intended for Rosie’s sixteenth birthday, explaining the situation and why she had to do what she did. Use the play text to find specific details about this situation to refer to in the letter. 2 Improvise the tense phone call from Jackie to Rosie’s father explaining that Rosie has been born.

Rosie Metcalfe Born in Manchester in 1971, Rosie is the only daughter of Jackie and Graham, a married man with whom Jackie has had an affair. At three months old, Rosie moves to Raynes Park, London, where she is raised by Margaret, who she believes to be her mother. Aged fifteen, she finds out that Jackie is her real mother, following Margaret’s death. After this, she moves to Oldham to live with Doris. Rosie is present as a baby in Act One, Scenes Six and Nine. She is represented visually by a bundle of blankets in a Moses basket, and vocally by crying sounds made by the actress who will play her later in the play. We do not meet her properly until Act One, Scene Ten: the last scene of the play’s first act. This scene is opened by Rosie, alone on stage, talking to Margaret’s old doll, Suky, who we remember from Scene Two. Rosie is younger here than Margaret was in Scene Two, but she acts in a more confident and streetwise manner, professing to want a ‘Sex Pistols tee shirt’ more than a doll, and sounding aghast at the thought she ‘could be seen dead’ wearing ‘last year’s summer dresses’ (37–8). Rosie clearly admires Jackie, telling us that ‘No one else at school has a sister who’s a grown up’, threatening Suky (and indirectly Margaret) that she could ‘run away with Jackie and

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live with her’, and stopping to paint a picture for Jackie (37– 8). At times her awe of Jackie is unproductive, such as when she feels her own painting is not good enough for Jackie to see. It is interesting to note that Rosie wants to paint like Jackie, but seems to lack the skill, perhaps emphasizing the idea of nurture over nature. Rosie is very aware of the competition between Jackie and Margaret. At times, she does her best to exploit it by playing them off against each other. She questions Jackie for buying her a birthday cake when ‘Mum usually makes one’, before immediately criticizing the look and taste of her mum’s cake and revealing that Margaret and Ken have not touched the exotic alcohol Jackie brought them back from Mexico. She also complains that Margaret is ‘so mean’ for not buying her the Sex Pistols shirt (38). However, Rosie is also confused and uneasy about the obvious tension between her mother and ‘sister’. She scolds them for bickering, before getting up to physically remove herself from the situation. She changes her mind about the painting she intended for Jackie, snatching it away from her and giving it to Margaret instead. Rosie shares a physical closeness with Margaret that she does not have with Jackie; stage directions specifying that they hug and embrace. Although she tells both women off for squabbling, she always sides with Margaret in the end, and seems quite protective over her, comforting her after she becomes angry with Jackie, and telling Jackie she hates her, presumably for upsetting Margaret (43). Although Rosie only really features in the final scene of Act One, she is immediately present in Act Two, entering the stage alone and scolding the empty living room of her grandparents’ house, as if speaking to her dead grandfather, informing him how hurt Margaret and Doris were about his decision to leave the house to Jackie. This informs us that Rosie, though still a child of eleven, is only too aware of the tensions in her family’s lives. When we meet Rosie again in Act Three, Scene Two, she has grown much more sophisticated, which seems at least partially

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influenced by her holiday with Jackie. Whereas in Act Two she complains at the suggestion of eating curry and wants to go for a McDonald’s instead, here she recounts details of the ‘marvellous’ Italian food they have enjoyed in Venice. However, Rosie still has the energy and abandon of a child, and her newfound sophistication seems slightly put-on. When Rosie eventually discovers her parentage, she is hurt and disgusted by Jackie’s behaviour, accusing her of wanting her ‘own life more than you wanted mine’ (83). However, in her final scene (Act Three, Scene Seven), she seems to have made her peace with Jackie, showing appreciation for the painting Jackie has done ‘specially for me’, and revealing that she has seen Jackie recently. She has also forged an extremely warm and supportive relationship with her elderly great-grandmother Doris; one which seems founded on mutual respect and cooperation.

Things to do 1 Rosie was born in 1971, so in 2015, when this book was written, she would be forty-four years-old. Use the following questions as prompts for small group discussions: What do you think Rosie might have done in her life since the final scene of the play? Has she developed a career? Has she had any children? If so, how old are they? What might they do? Come together as a class to share the results of your discussions and note any similarities and differences that have occurred between your groups. 2 Write a postcard from Rosie to Margaret from Rosie and Jackie’s holiday. Try to capture what Rosie might want to express in no more than 100 words.

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Wasteground characters The wasteground scenes exist outside the conventions of time and place established in the rest of the play. In them, all the characters appear as their child selves, aged between five and nine. Keatley writes: ‘Their ages correspond to the amount of obligation they carry’ (Keatley 1994: lix). By this, she seems to mean that Doris is youngest (at five) because the lack of choice allowed to her generation of women leads to a lack of responsibility. Next youngest is Rosie (at eight), who by the end of the play is not yet adult enough to truly understand the pressures she will face as a woman. Margaret and Jackie are oldest (both nine) because they both live through, and are brought face to face with, the widest range of choices and subsequent responsibilities, pressures and stresses, over the course of the play. The child characters, therefore, represent the subconscious of the characters that appear elsewhere in the play. In addition, the child characters in the wasteground scenes seem to present us with an exaggerated or distilled essence of their corresponding adult characters. English and drama teacher, Louisa Warde, who has worked extensively with this play with classes and as a school production, suggests: The little girl scenes are their personalities amplified. Doris is quite timid and doesn’t know much and is quite naïve. Jackie is bold and not particularly nice, but says it how it is. Rosie is more thoughtful, but still says it how it is. Margaret is the one that is quite petty and unpleasant, and so that’s kind of how you end up seeing Margaret as an adult. It is unlikely that Keatley would intentionally vilify Margaret, but Warde’s critical reading of this character seems quite common. Alternatively, Brigid Larmour comments that she began to sympathize more with Margaret and less with Jackie as she got older. It might be interesting to consider your own instinctual responses to the play’s characters, and think about how and why you might be prejudiced towards or against them (see the second exercise suggested below).

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Things to do 1 From the list below, choose five words that you think best describe each character. Find a line from the text to support or evidence each of your choices. Affectionate Ambitious Anxious Bitter Bold Calm Caring Childish Cold Competitive Content Conventional Creative Deceitful Difficult Dishonest Easy-going Energetic Free Generous Guilty Intelligent Irresponsible Irritable Jealous Kind Lonely Loving Maternal Misguided Obstinate Open-minded Patient Playful Political Prejudiced Protective Proud Relaxed Resentful Resilient Responsible Restless Restricted Sensible Strong Stubborn Warm Weak Wise 2 How do the characters in the play make you feel? Do you like them? Dislike them? Sympathize with them? Get angry with them? Make a note of your response to each character, using evidence from the text to justify your reactions towards them.

Dramatic technique Structure A lot of plays present their stories using what we might call a chronological, narrative or linear arrangement of time. This means that the events within the play happen in a sequential order, and seem to follow on from one another. Many plays have been written in this way since Ancient Greek times, when the philosopher Aristotle wrote a series of rules for drama, which included this idea of ‘unity’ of time (Aristotle, trans. Heath 1996: 13–15). However, many playwrights have sought to disrupt this unity in their writing. One key example is the

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German theatre-maker Bertolt Brecht, whose work often used an ‘Epic’ style, in which stories span many years and are not necessarily presented in a straightforward chronological order (Willet 1967: 168–70). You can see the influence of this style in Keatley’s play, which spans five decades and four generations, and jumps forwards and backwards in time, particularly within its first act, in order to reveal the story gradually in segments, rather than as one long narrative. Keatley is keen to stress that all the scenes within the play should be viewed as the present, and none depicted as flashbacks, in order to highlight the moments of genuine choice that are open to the characters throughout their lives. Rather than see the characters’ choices as unchangeable moments decided in the past, the play presents them as living moments, at each of which an audience should feel the possibility of an alternative outcome. This is another aspect Keatley’s work shares with Brecht’s. However, Keatley cites another inspiration for her structure, claiming it is one that is particularly relevant to and practised by women: [I]t happens quite often, in contemporary plays by women, time doesn’t go chronologically. It doesn’t just go forward. We seem to be able to refer sideways and backwards at the same time and understand that that’s not confusing, but very useful. KEATLEY in Stephenson and Langridge 1997: 77

Keatley initially struggled to have her work produced because of its unusual structure, even being told her work ‘was not a play’ (Keatley 1994: xxiii). A lot of reviews of early productions of the play also struggled to comprehend the play’s structure, which you can read more about in the section on Critical Reception. Having moved backwards and forwards in time over a period spanning almost forty years during the course of Act One, Act Two is very differently structured, featuring just

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one continuous scene. It is also, with the exception of the wasteground scenes, the only part of the play in which all four of the play’s characters appear together. Working with a more traditional dramatic structure, the one continuous scene of Act Two builds towards a more conventional dramatic climax. Everything about the scene makes the situation more tense and stressful. It has snowed, and Margaret, Rosie and Doris have had a ‘terrible’ journey up from London, where Doris has been staying since Jack’s death. Across the course of the act, tempers wear thinner and tensions between the women rise, up to the point where Rosie uncovers her earliest baby clothes that Jackie had kept back in Act One, Scene Six, and left at Doris’s house later that winter. The uncovering of the secret clothes threatens an uncovering of the secret behind them, which is felt by all the characters and the audience. When Rosie asks Margaret to ‘guess what Jackie told me’, and Margaret can only stutter ‘What’ and ‘No . . . ’ in the terror of being found out, an audience experiences the suspense of assuming this is the lead up to the play’s big reveal. However, Jackie diverts the expected climax, explaining away Margaret’s shock as her ‘not feeling well’, and distracting Rosie away from the topic of the baby clothes (62–3). The play’s third act has a structure somewhere between those of the first two acts. It contains eight relatively short scenes, but with the exception of two out-of-time wasteground scenes, and a final scene set in 1923, these are all presented in chronological order, and all take place in 1987: the year Keatley completed the play and it was first produced. Because Act Three spans a much shorter time period than Act One, Keatley suggests that this ‘Accelerated time creates a sense of urgency’ (xliv), as though time is running out, literally in Margaret’s case, and metaphorically in Jackie’s. If you find the play’s unusual structure and frequent time shifts difficult to keep track of, try referring back to the Overview section at the beginning of this guide. When revising for the examination, you could make your own shortened

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version of the Overview to help remind you of the overall structure of the play.

Language In her commentary to the 1994 student edition of the play, Keatley suggests that the play does not consist of one ‘language’, but of four, as ‘Each woman speaks in a different vocabulary and speech rhythm, according to her generation and place of upbringing’ (lxiii). For example, Doris uses a number of what we might now consider to be quite old-fashioned words, such as ‘smalls’ to mean underwear (88), ‘umbrage’ to mean offence (69) and ‘housewifery’ to describe her role in maintaining Jack’s home and raising his children (47). Contrastingly, Rosie’s language is full of words more contemporary to her generation, including slang like ‘kazooming’ and brand names like ‘Blu-tac’ (42). However, in reality, there are more than four languages in the play, because each woman’s language develops with her age. For example, in Act Three, Scene Two, when Rosie has returned from her grown-up holiday with Jackie, her language is noticeably more sophisticated, including words like ‘marvellous’ and ‘fettucine’, and she speaks in longer, more confident sentences (72). In his review of the 1989 Royal Court production of the play, the Independent’s Paul Taylor noted that My Mother Said has ‘a script which is acutely observant about the way women talk to one another, even down to the different emotional shadings achieved by addressing your mother as Mother, Mum, Mummy, or by her Christian name’ (Taylor 1989). This point is highlighted in the text itself, in an early exchange between Jackie and Doris: Jackie She’s my Mummy. Doris I’m her Mummy. Jackie Yes but she calls you ‘Mother’. That’s different. Doris How? Jackie Just is. (13)

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The difference in terminology that Jackie struggles to define is to do with changing generational terminology. The oldfashioned ‘Mother’ used by Doris and Margaret, becoming ‘Mummy’ for Jackie and the even more contemporary ‘Mum’ for Rosie. But as well as the changing times, these changing terms also mirror a deformalizing of the mother-daughter relationship. This is also evident in Rosie’s shortening of Granny to Gran, which causes Doris to wonder, ‘when did I stop being Granny, and turn into Gran?’ (49). Rosie insists, ‘You like it’, and Doris does not protest, suggesting this loosening of the formality of these relationships is a positive thing. This theory is taken to its logical conclusion in Act Three, Scene Seven, by which time Rosie has taken to calling all the women in her family by their first names. Although this is partly necessitated by the confusion of mother/sister, grandmother/mother and grandmother/great-grandmother that she has recently experienced, it also signals a developing equality amongst the women. Although Keatley was keen for her dialogue to sound authentic to the age and upbringing of each of her characters, she did not intend for it to have a ‘verbatim’ or ‘documentary’ realism. This allows the women to express themselves more fully, clearly and without interruption than real-life speech usually allows. Take, for example, Jackie’s monologue in Act Three, Scene Five. In real life, it would be unusual for a woman in Jackie’s situation to speak at such length and with such eloquence without being interrupted, or losing her thread, but the dramatic form allows Keatley to give Jackie the opportunity to express all her pent up frustration and grief at losing Rosie, as well as to create powerful images for the audience, such as the picture she describes of seeing Rosie’s father Graham ‘across the lake, he was buying [his children] ice creams, his wife was taking a picture’, or that of his imagined house: ‘open fire, it was trendy’, ‘big gardens, pine kitchens’ (84).

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Things to do

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elect a moment from the text which depicts intergenerational conflict. Suggest how Keatley gives her characters different vocabularies and ways of speaking to emphasize the differences between the women.

Design Keatley has stressed that the play does not need a naturalistic stage design that depicts the spaces of the play in close-to-life detail. Such an approach to design would, in fact, be impossible due to the ‘Epic’ nature of the play. With so many short scenes, moving forwards and backwards in time and place, detailed set design would not be able to keep up without lengthy scene changes that would ruin the pace and atmosphere of the play. Instead, Keatley encourages a minimalist, symbolic or representative approach to design, specifying, ‘if set design is cluttered, the images won’t have the same impact’ (Keatley 1994: xxvi). She prefers the word ‘environment’ to ‘set’, as she wants ‘as little as possible to distract us from watching the actors’ (xxxvii). Most of all, she stresses that there ‘are no sofas in this play’, and that the stage space should be ‘a magic place where things can happen’, not a restrictive, domestic setting (3). The lack of furniture also maintains a state of discomfort and awkwardness amongst the characters; with nothing to hide behind, or sit down on, they are physically, as well as emotionally exposed. This is emphasized further by Keatley’s decision to set many of the scenes outdoors. Although outdoor spaces are more exposed and potentially less comfortable than indoor ones, Keatley points out that they are also ‘freer space

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for women than domestic rooms, so there is more possibility for change’ (Keatley 1994: xxviii). This is important in a play that examines the restrictions on women’s choices, and their potential to break away from these. More important than the straightforward physical aspects of the set are the atmospheric and symbolic associations that are generated by the look of the scenes. For example, the first part of Act One, Scene Two, set in December 1940, has a cold atmosphere that matches the relationship between Doris and Margaret. Alongside the dialogue and the performances of the actors, this atmosphere is established with ‘austere decor’, and the fact there are ‘no Christmas decorations’, except a single vase of Christmas roses, despite it being Christmas Eve (8–9).

Things to do

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esign a set for the play. Think carefully about how you can suggest the settings of the different scenes within a single space. Draw your designs on A4 paper and provide a short commentary explaining your decisions.

Lighting Given the style of design required by the play, lighting can be a very important tool, helping to quickly create a warm or cold atmosphere for a scene, or suggest whether it is set indoors or outdoors. Unlike the set, Keatley suggests that the use of light should be naturalistic, creating a shortcut for the audience and actors to ‘identify with the experience of being in the real place’, even if other aspects of that place are not visibly present (Keatley 1994: xxvi). For example, the first section of Act One, Scene Two, set at night during an air raid blackout, requires a very different quality of light to Act One, Scene Four, in which

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Jackie is sunbathing in the garden on a May day, and to Act One, Scene Seven, where Margaret and Doris are outdoors, but trying to get the washing in before a thunderstorm breaks. The more ‘other-worldly’ nature of the wasteground scenes may also be signalled by a lighting state that sets them apart from the rest of the play.

Sound Like lighting, sound is a very useful tool with which to establish the setting, and in particular the era, of each scene. Keatley writes that ‘every scene begins with a sound cue which locates time and place. Sound also defines size and distance in the environment’ (Keatley 1994: xxix). For example, in Act One, Scene Two, the period of the scene is established by the use of George Formby’s ‘Chinese Laundry Blues’, which is playing on the radio at the start of the scene. Halfway through the scene, the sound of music is replaced by the more threatening noise of the air-raid siren, and the ‘distant rumble of aeroplanes’, which establish the historical context of the Second World War (10–11). The second part of the scene, set in 1961, establishes a brighter atmosphere with the sound of birdsong. Similarly, in Act One, Scene Four, the tone and period of the scene is immediately established by The Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ playing from Jackie’s transistor radio. However, these sound effects do more than simply set the scene; they often tell us something more about the play’s characters or themes. For example, the George Formby track used in Scene Two reveals aspects of Doris’s character and highlights the hypocrisy in the fact that she enjoys this unsophisticated style of ‘Music Hall’ song, but criticizes Margaret for wanting to play carols rather than Beethoven. Likewise the ‘distant rumble of thunder’ we hear in Act One, Scene Seven, establishes the hot, humid atmosphere of the day on which the scene takes place, but also implies the brooding tension between the characters. In this scene, we also hear light

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aircraft overhead, prompting Margaret and Doris to discuss the continued presence of American airmen after the war: a subject which causes them some disagreement. Most of the play’s sound effects seem intended to be played as recorded sound. However, one is created live by the performers. This is when Rosie cries loudly through the first part of Act One, Scene Six, underscoring the strain of Jackie’s situation. This sound is made by the actress playing Rosie, who can be seen at the side of the stage, whilst a basket of blankets represents baby Rosie. This device reminds us that the play is not intended to be wholly realistic in terms of its style.

Costume Visual indications of the scene’s period are also shown in the characters’ costumes. For example, Jackie’s ‘flared jeans with sewn on badges’, popular with teenagers in the 1960s, in Act One, Scene Four, and Margaret’s 1950s’ ski pants in Act One, Scene Seven. Costume is also used to establish or change a scene’s mood or atmosphere, and to reveal aspects of character. For example, when Doris returns, as her older self, in the second part of Act One, Scene Two, set in 1961, she is wearing a floral apron, brightening the tone of the scene and helping to signal her warmer attitude towards Jackie, in comparison to her relationship with Margaret in the first part of the scene. Costume is often used to establish character difference. In Act One, Scene Seven, the frumpishness of Doris’s ‘sensible beige skirt’ is intended to contrast with the garishness of Margaret’s 1950s ski pants (29). Likewise, in Act Three, Scene Two, Margaret wears a ‘sensible suit’, which fits the setting of her office, but Rosie invades this environment with her ‘colourful and sophisticated holiday clothes’ and an ‘orange kite’, which she proceeds to ‘swoop round the office space’ (71). The colourful spontaneity and exuberance of Rosie’s

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world highlight the drab routine of Margaret’s. Then, a third element is added to the scene. We are told something about Jackie’s choice of clothes even before she enters: ‘she’s gone into the third floor Ladies to change into her Art Dealer dress. She doesn’t want you to see her looking a mess’ (71). Whilst Jackie can enjoy the freedom of Rosie’s world on holiday, she feels she has to make herself presentable and professional again, not only before she returns to work, but even before she meets her mother. When Rosie sees what she has changed into, she says, ‘You’ve spoiled it now, Miss Executive. You should go to work wearing that turquoise thing’. When Jackie protests that she could not attend an ‘incredibly important meeting’ wearing a ‘beach dress’, Rosie protests, ‘All the more reason to let them see what you’re really like’. ‘I can’t start now’, maintains Jackie, demonstrating that she, like Margaret, feels the need to repress her personality and personal life in the workplace; a tendency that is most visible in her choice of clothes (74). Act Two sees a lot of costumes return to the stage as props: Margaret’s ski pants, Doris’s beige skirt, Jackie’s flares and cheesecloth shirts, Rosie’s baby clothes and a 1920s dress that we do not see Doris wear until the final scene of the play. As Doris says, ‘There’s generations here, all mixed up, if you poke about’ (60). The way the women reject or idolize the fashions of previous generations is telling. Rosie thinks Jackie’s hippy wear is ‘revolting’, but Margaret’s ski pants are ‘mega trendy’, and Jackie seems impressed by the 1920s dress. These attitudes mirror the play’s suggestion that we may find it easier to make connections with the generations to which we are not so immediately and intimately related.

Props/objects The props or objects used within the play are crucial to Keatley’s conception of it: ‘The objects written into the play are very ordinary ones’, she explains, ‘which take on

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extraordinary powers because of the way they appear and reappear’. A key part of this concept is that all domestic objects have a history, and whenever an object appears within the play, ‘it brings that emotional history onstage’ (Keatley 1994: xxx). For example, we first see Jackie’s red transistor radio, blaring out ‘All You Need Is Love’ in a sunny garden in Act One, Scene Four. This lends an added poignancy to the opening of Act One, Scene Six, in which the same radio reports freezing temperatures, further emphasizing the bleakness of the scene, and underscoring how quickly Jackie’s carefree life has fallen apart. Another set of objects that acquire a pivotal emotional significance are Rosie’s baby clothes. In Act One, Scene Six, Jackie is packing Rosie’s clothes into a holdall, in preparation for giving her up to be raised by Margaret. Jackie’s ambivalence towards letting Rosie go is represented by her attitude towards Rosie’s clothes. As she panics over her decision, the stage directions instruct her to pull the holdall away from Margaret, only to return it to her a line later, resigned again to what she must do. But though she lets Margaret take the majority of Rosie’s things, she holds back a bag of Rosie’s first clothes. Whilst this is a practical matter – Rosie has grown out of these clothes and no longer needs them – they also represent the time Rosie and Jackie have spent together as mother and daughter, which Margaret can never take away from Jackie. ‘Our secrets’, Jackie calls them, promising to ‘take care of them’ (28). When the clothes reappear in Act Two, they carry the history of these emotional associations into the scene. Another key moment that foregrounds the emotional weight of objects within the play is the sequence in Act Two where Margaret and Jackie clear the shelves of Doris’s dresser. Each object they take down provokes a memory: a photograph of Margaret as a child on Scarborough beach; a rose bowl Jack won in the 1949 Manchester Business Awards; a pottery duck Jackie made as a child. The object that causes the biggest reveal is a photograph of Doris’s mother. When Jackie wonders why

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she has never seen the picture, which was hidden away in a biscuit tin on the top shelf of the dresser, Margaret explains that Jack disapproved of the picture because Doris’s mother was unmarried.

Action Throughout the play, the characters carry out a number of actions that reveal much more than the dialogue alone. Keatley explains: I wanted to capture the way in which women, whatever class, are much more likely than men to be working, to be doing something all the time. All the way through this play, the characters are doing: folding sheets, providing food, packing or unpacking, dusting and polishing. It’s a classic scenario: at the emotional moment when two women are trying to communicate, one is doing something else. KEATLEY

1994: 130

For example, as Act One, Scene Two opens, Doris ‘dusts the piano lovingly’ (9), and throughout the scene Margaret plays with her doll, Suky. Both these actions contrast with the tone of the majority of the scene. For example, Doris demonstrates more love towards the piano than she does towards Margaret, and Margaret mothers the doll more affectionately than Doris mothers Margaret. Stage directions tell us that Doris ‘shakes’ Margaret and ‘pulls her out from under piano by her arm’, whilst Margaret ‘comforts’ Suky, sings softly to her, and soothes her: ‘Suky don’t cry. Mummy will cuddle you’ (9). Other actions in the scene include Margaret playing the piano, and Doris making up Margaret’s bed. In both cases, Doris scolds Margaret for trying to introduce an element of emotion or imagination into these activities. At the end of the scene, Margret scolds Suky, ‘Sssh Suky Ssh! – No, I won’t hold you. You ought to go to sleep now, by yourself. You don’t need your Mummy to kiss

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you. You’re eight years old’ (13), demonstrating that she has begun to internalize her mother’s emotionally repressive style of mothering. In Act One, Scene Four, the stage directions tell us that Jackie ‘sprawls on the grass’, a verb laden with the casual, relaxed attitude of her character in this scene. Margret’s actions are designed to contrast with this. She appears ‘flustered’, and ‘switches off the transistor’, cutting off the music that symbolises Jackie’s ‘free love’ generation. In Act One, Scene Five, it is the actions of Margaret and Doris that are in conflict with one another. Doris wants to make Margaret stay; she brings out chairs and a rug, and offers tea and cake. Margaret resists sitting until the stage direction ‘she gives into pressure and sits’ (21), but she soon gets up again, unable to cope with Jackie’s description of mothering her doll. The physical disharmony between the two is again evident in Act One, Scene Seven, in which Doris and Margaret are taking down and folding washing. The tension between them is made physically evident through the way they handle this task; at one point, ‘Margaret pulls so hard that Doris lets go and they jerk back from each other’. At the end of the scene, a clap of thunder causes Doris to drop the washing basket, spilling washing everywhere, as if she is losing a grip on her housework in the same way she is losing her grip on her daughter. In Act Three, Scene One, Margaret and Doris are planting geranium seedlings. Performing this action together as mature women is noticeably less fraught than their sheet-folding task in Act One. It also symbolises the potential for new life and growth. Perhaps surprisingly, this new growth seems most evident in Doris. We hear that she has ‘transformed this backyard’ in the five years since her move to Oldham, and her attempts to connect with Margaret seem the most genuine and heart-felt they have ever been. Although initially hostile, Margaret eventually confides in her mother, and the two share one of their most intimate exchanges before working together to plant the delicate seedling: ‘Doris gently lowers the geranium

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plant into the hole Margaret has dug. Margaret pats soil around it’ (70). At the end of the scene, Doris offers to show Margaret a photograph of her mother, which she believes Margaret has never seen; another action which symbolizes the new-found intimacy between the pair. Margaret honours this offer by pretending that she has not seen the picture before. The moment of potential solidarity that Margaret and Doris find, too late, in Act Three, Scene One, reappears in a more sustained and sustainable context in the relationship between Doris and Rosie in Act Three, Scene Seven. The task the two women are engaged with here is not domestic, nor wholly ‘professional’, but somewhere between the two: the cottage industry Rosie has set up to make and sell ‘protest kites’. The coming together of Doris’s experienced handiwork (‘Needs a stitch in it’) and Rosie’s politicized creativity finds a productive unity in the activity, which matches the productive unity of Rosie and Doris’s cohabitation: Doris Rosie Doris Rosie Doris Rosie Doris

I’m going to put tea on. Can you pass my shoes? I’ll do it. No, it really is my turn. – Have you got me a birthday cake! Yes. I love you, Doris. A long time since anyone’s said that to me. (91)

It is very telling that the solidarity that Rosie and Doris have established is both more equal and more emotionally rewarding than any of the male-female or mother-daughter relationships previously depicted in the play. Interestingly, the other action that accompanies this scene is Rosie trying to work out the solitaire game that belonged to Doris and, before that, to Doris’s mother. A game to be played alone, previously mentioned in reference to Doris’s lonely evenings with Jack, in this scene becomes something different: another secret passed down through the generations of women.

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Not a nasty damaging secret they keep from each other, but an enriching, playful one they share with each other. Keatley reveals that she deliberately tempered the image of Rosie completing the solitaire alone with the silent reappearance of the other three women in the play ‘because I didn’t want it to be an image of isolation. [. . .] it’s the image of this woman, at this moment, in this century now, finding her culture: her female inheritance, and strength’ (Keatley in Stephenson and Langridge 1997: 80).

Critical reception The following section focuses on the critical response to the 1989 production of My Mother Said at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Several reviewers were struck by the play’s innovative structure. Claire Armistead, writing in the Financial Times, considered that the play’s ‘great strength is its structure, which teases the lives of the four women into parallel at the same time as making abundantly clear the painful, paradoxical knots between mothers, their daughters and grand-daughters’ (1989). In the Guardian, Michael Billington wrote that by ‘Switching back and forth in time (and periodically bringing the four women together to play [. . .]), the play captures the cyclical nature of family life’ (1989). Lyn Gardner felt that the play’s structure ‘artfully ties the personal strands of the lives of four generations of women together [. . .] to present the longer view: a remarkable document of eighty odd years of social (and feminist) history’ (1989), and the Independent’s Paul Taylor discussed these effects at length: Jumping backwards and forwards in time between the 1920s and the present, the play focuses on four women of different generations – from northern matriarch Doris (born in 1900), to her great-granddaughter Rosie (born in 1971). As well as conveying some of the poignancy you

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feel when flicking randomly through an old photograph album, this achronological patterning is an ingenious device for emphasising the constants in the experiences of these four women, despite the century’s sweeping social changes. In particular, it shows how mothers pass on to daughters the burden of frustrated ambition, while resenting them for their greater freedom and increased expectations. TAYLOR

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Many reviewers also picked up on some of the themes discussed earlier in this book. As previously referenced, Billington highlighted the theme of secrets and lies, and Armistead writes about the theme of women’s choices, and the way things are passed down the generations: If the play is about inheritance it is also about disinheritance. Like Caryl Churchill in Top Girls, Keatley has moulded the piece round a tacit acceptance that every advance has its price. Most obvious is the forfeiture of motherhood for career; but in a less tangible way, by styling herself mother to her own grand-daughter, Margaret too has lost out on the privileged closeness of grandmother to grandchild. Another notable feature of several reviews was an acknowledgement that this was an important play that was somehow very in touch with the needs of the times. Armistead references the fact that the play had already won a prestigious ‘George Devine Award’, after its Manchester premiere, and cites the ‘fanfare of publicity’ with which it arrived at the Royal Court as proof that the play had ‘already struck a major chord’ with the public. Similarly, Gardner suggests, ‘I suspect that this is a landmark play. The theatrical equivalent of breaking the four minute mile; like Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls pointing the way for the next generation of women playwrights both in form and content’.

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ot all reviews of My Mother Said engaged with the play as readily as those quoted from above. From the following extracts from reviews by Milton Shulman in the Evening Standard and Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph, pick out any words or phrases that are used to dismiss or patronize Keatley’s play and explain their connotations. Milton Shulman, Evening Standard, 6 March 1989 With a cast of four women, written by a woman and not a man in sight, My Mother Said I Never Should by Charlotte Keatley should find a receptive audience from listeners to Woman’s Hour and readers of middle brow women’s magazines. In the story of Jackie, who gives her illegitimate infant, Rosie, to her mother Margaret, so that the child will be secretly raised as her sister, Miss Keatley manages to cram in a clutch of trendy and sentimental dilemmas that intrigue and bother the contemporary British female. Although the most obtrusive theme is the plight of Jackie having to choose between her maternal instincts and her career ambitions, the play also touches upon the broken marriage, the generation gap, the single parent, the faithless husband, nursery games, family guilt, precocious intolerance and mother love. [. . .] With a couple of scenes in which all the women – from grandma to great grand-child – are dressed in baby clothes singing childish rhymes, the author intends to assure us that the upbringing, the frustrations and expectations of women hardly change as the decades slip by. The spectacle of grown-up women babbling as infants is, however, slightly embarrassing. [. . .] The audience’s tear ducts are attacked, too, with Jane Gurnett as Jackie having to justify her abandonment of her child and when stroking her baby’s rabbit dress uttering the heart-rending cry “You’ll never call me Mummy”.

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Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 16 March 1989 Like a weepy story in a women’s magazine, there are moments in My Mother Said I Never Should which touch the heart without unduly troubling the brain. Charlotte Keatley’s award-winning play, [. . .] is at its best when it is at its most unashamedly sentimental and warmhearted. [. . .] But despite some beautifully observed scenes of family life, Miss Keatley, who is still in her twenties, embroiders her simple story with elaborate, self-conscious artistry. Instead of presenting a straightforward narrative, she chops her story up into gobbets, and arranges them with no regard for chronology. And in the play’s most damaging misjudgement, the dramatist has also interpolated fantasy scenes, in which all four women play themselves as young girls, meeting together in a collective childhood of the subconscious to put curses on their mothers. [. . .] For reasons that are no doubt impeccably feminist, Miss Keatley has also banished all the male characters from the stage. Fathers and husbands are talked about but never seen, creating a curiously lopsided impression. It is as though she is favouring her audience with only one half of the story.

There are many things you may have picked out of these extracts, but here are some possible responses: ●

Both Spencer and Shulman begin their reviews by making a patronizing comparison between Keatley’s play and populist forms of women’s entertainment: women’s magazines and the BBC radio programme Women’s Hour. These comparisons imply that the play is more a trivial piece of entertainment than a serious work of art, and also that it will only appeal to women.

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●

Both critics describe the piece as ‘sentimental’ – a word that means full of feeling, or sentiment, but often implies that this is a negative quality. Although Spencer suggests that the play’s sentimentality is its strongest feature, he uses this point to imply that Keatley (or women in general) should stick to writing about feelings, and not attempt what he dismisses as ‘elaborate, self-conscious artistry’. A connected, but more positive point is made by Billington’s review, which describes a ‘true, touching, heartfelt play’, before breaking off to note, as an aside, ‘(interesting that it’s women who increasingly bring emotion onto the court’s stage)’. However, Billington then goes on to suggest that whilst Keatley is ‘not afraid of emotion in the theatre’, ‘there is a hidden play under the obvious one’, which is more to do with the theme of lying. Additionally, rather than compare Keatley’s work to Women’s Hour, like Shulman, he links it to a quotation from the well-respected and established political playwright, David Hare.

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Both critics struggle to respond to the wasteground scenes, with Shulman describing them as ‘embarrassing’. Embarrassment is a common response when we are struggling to understand something, as discussed further in Louisa Warde’s interview about teaching this play.

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Spencer keeps referring to the playwright as ‘Miss Keatley’, a choice that deliberately flouts the journalistic convention of referring to people initially by their first name and surname, and thereafter by their surname alone. By doing so, he signals Keatley’s gender difference and youth. He also explicitly states that Keatley is ‘still in her twenties’ to further question her capabilities.

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Related work A Taste of Honey (Shelagh Delaney, 1958) Like My Mother Said, Delaney’s play is set in the Manchester area: in Salford, where Delaney was born and raised; and like Keatley, Delaney was still a young woman when she wrote it. A Taste of Honey is the most critically renowned work by a woman from a period dominated by male playwriting, and stood as a landmark inspiration for women writers of Keatley’s generation. Like Keatley’s play, it focuses on a troubled mother-daughter relationship, in this case between the promiscuous, alcoholic Helen, and her half-neglected daughter, Jo. Like Jackie, Jo has a considerable artistic talent, but her limited background means this is unable to fully develop, and Jo’s life is compromised further when she has an illegitimate child. Despite being somewhat ahead of its time in terms of the depiction of such themes, the play’s structure is quite traditional and linear.

Top Girls (Caryl Churchill, 1982) Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls shares many aspects of style, theme and context with Keatley’s play. Also written in the 1980s, Churchill’s play is as concerned as Keatley’s with the choices available to women, particularly those relating to their ability to have a career and/or a family. Both plays explore the way women restrict each other’s choices, as well as having those choices restricted by men and by society, and both writers force women to examine their own behaviour, and how it may hold back other women. Like Jackie, Marlene, the main character in Top Girls, achieves a high level of career success, after giving up her baby daughter, in this case to be raised by her sister, Joyce. We do not actually witness this act, which has happened many years before the start of the play, but we do witness its aftermath,

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and the effects it has had on Marlene’s relationships with her sister, Joyce, and daughter, Angie. Marlene’s decision is presented less sympathetically than Jackie’s, partly because Marlene has condemned Angie to a life of financial poverty with Joyce, whilst Jackie sees that Rosie will enjoy a more comfortable existence with Margaret. There are striking similarities between Act Three, Scene Two of My Mother Said, where Rosie disrupts the quiet professionalism of Margaret’s workplace by bursting in unexpectedly on her way back from holiday; and Act Two, Scene One of Top Girls, where Angie startles Marlene by turning up unannounced at her office. Both Marlene and Margaret are clearly thrown by, and uncomfortable about, the intrusion of their family into their workplace. The plays also share similar dramatic and structural devices, such as an all-female cast, non-linear structure, and the inclusion of out-of-time scenes where characters from different time periods can meet and talk. In Top Girls, the play’s first scene features a range of historical and fictional women, such as the legendary Pope Joan, and Patient Griselda from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, gathered together at a dinner party to celebrate Marlene’s career success.

When I was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout (Sharman Macdonald, 1984) Macdonald’s play shares many thematic and structural links with Keatley’s. Again, writing at a very similar time in the 1980s, Macdonald also focuses her work on the mother-daughter relationship and its potential to pass down repressive ideology to the next generation of young women. The play is the story of Fiona and her mother Morag, whose partially repressive, partially disinterested mothering drove fifteen-year-old Fiona to deliberately get pregnant to force her mother into looking after her, rather than abandoning her to move abroad with her new partner. Consequently, it explores many similar themes to My

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Mother Said, including motherhood, giving up children, generational difference and the way women’s sexuality can be controlled and restricted by other women, as well as by men. Similarly to My Mother Said, the play moves forwards and backwards between different time periods, interspersing scenes from the play’s present (1983), in which Fiona is thirty-two, with scenes from Fiona’s childhood, set between 1955 and 1966. These scenes require the adult actors to play children, as in My Mother Said, and feature a number of games in which the young girls (Fiona and her friend Vari) naïvely mimic adult rituals, as in the wasteground scenes. Despite having many scenes that are described as ‘the bedroom’ or ‘the bathroom’, like My Mother Said, the play advises against naturalistic domestic representations, instead recreating these scenes out of a set that depicts a beach and promenade.

Our Father (Charlotte Keatley, 2012) Our Father is Charlotte Keatley’s only other published play. It was produced by the Watford Palace Theatre in 2012, where it was directed by Brigid Larmour, who also directed the 1987 premiere of My Mother Said at Manchester’s Contact Theatre, and a 2009 revival at Watford Palace. The play has a number of links with My Mother Said, featuring a central motherdaughter relationship, and examining how mothers can pass things down to their offspring: in this case, anxiety, eating disorders and other mental health problems. A physically absent, but still very present, father/grandfather figure is also key to the plot, although this play also includes male on-stage characters. In her introduction to the published play, Keatley writes of the ‘emotional, physical and psychological wounds that run through most families. I’ve tried to write a play about the way we all carry damage that has happened to people in our families – for generations – until the story is let out and the hurt is acknowledged and can be released’ (Keatley 2012: 3); a theme that is common to My Mother Said. The play also has

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stylistic similarities to My Mother Said, requiring a nonnaturalistic stage design, in which ‘all the times and places of the scenes should co-exist’ (6), and a non-linear time structure, which switches between 2012, 2002, 1996, 1986 and 1212.

Glossary of dramatic terms Act just as a book is often split into chapters, a play is often broken down into a number of units called acts. Each act has its own narrative arc (or structure), and all the acts combine to provide the narrative arc of the play as a whole. For example, in My Mother Said, Act One introduces all the characters’ histories, and establishes how their relationships have developed over a long period of time. Act Two tells the story of one day in December 1982 when all the characters come together to clear Doris and Jack’s old house, and Act Three presents the events of 1987, when all the histories, conflicts and secrets established in the first two acts find their way out. Together, they present a complex, intergenerational picture of women’s experience. Action action is a key feature of drama and is carefully inscribed within all successful plays. This does not mean that some plays will not contain lengthy and important moments of stillness, but that, at their root, each character will have a number of objectives to achieve over the course of the play, and their attempts to do so will require them to take a number of courses of action. Blocking blocking is the process whereby a director decides where and when the actors will move on the stage. Characters characters are created to inhabit a writer’s work. They may be entirely fictional constructs, or a writer’s creative representation of a real or historical figure. Characters in a play are interpreted and performed by different actors every time the play is staged. Costume costumes are the clothes worn on stage by the characters in a play. Sometimes the playwright will specify or suggest elements of these, such as Margaret’s ‘sensible suit’ or Rosie’s ‘colourful and

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sophisticated holiday clothes’ (71), but even within these stipulations, there will often be a level of creative freedom of interpretation for the designer working on the show. Director the director is the person responsible for the overall vision and coordination of the production on an artistic level. The director’s role includes helping the actors to unlock and interpret elements of character, blocking scenes to ensure all audience members have a good view of the production, and liaising with other members of the creative team, such as designers, to ensure an aesthetically coherent production develops. Dramatic irony this is a device by which a playwright draws on knowledge that the audience have, but the characters in the play do not, in order to create dramatic tension. An example of such a moment is when Rosie says of Jackie, ‘I can’t think of anyone less like a mother!’ (72), or Margaret says, ‘I’m not going to have a family’ (30) at a point in the play when we already know she will. Foreshadowing this is when a writer hints at a theme or circumstance early on in their play that will later be developed more explicitly. The wasteground scenes of My Mother Said often serve this function, introducing topics such as marriage, motherhood and death prior to their exploration within the other scenes of the play. Lighting theatres are usually designed to keep out natural light, and equipped with the facilities to recreate a range of lighting effects to suit the environments in which a play is set. Narrative the way a story is constructed and revealed to its audience or reader is often described by the term ‘narrative’. My Mother Said is interesting as an example of a non-linear narrative structure, where events are revealed in a different order from that in which they would have originally happened. Naturalism naturalism is a style of theatre, usually connected to the work of theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski and late nineteenth/early twentieth-century playwrights such as Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen. It involves the detailed and realistic representation of life on stage.

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Objective an objective is what a character wants to achieve at any point in the play; what drives the character. Playwright the playwright is the writer of the play. Note the unusual spelling: the term is not playwrite but playwright, deriving from the word ‘wrought’ meaning ‘made’. Thus, a playwright is someone who makes plays, as a ‘shipwright’ is someone who makes ships and a ‘cartwright’ someone who makes carts. Props objects used on stage by actors during the course of the play are known as ‘props’, which is short for ‘properties’. They were originally called so because they belonged to the theatre companies that used them, rather than the individual actors, who were once expected to provide their own costumes. Realism whereas the term ‘naturalism’ describes a particular movement in theatre, ‘realism’ is a more general term, which can describe the depiction of many sorts of reality on stage. In other words, a play such as My Mother Said might not have a detailed naturalistic set, but it can still incorporate several elements of realism in its depictions of characters and social situations. Scene the acts of a play can be broken down into smaller units called scenes, which are often differentiated by the time and place of their setting. However, sometimes, as in Act One, Scene Two of My Mother Said, a scene might encompass more than one time period or location in order to deliberately contrast events happening in each. Set the set is the environment that is constructed on a stage for a play to take place within. For more detail on this, see the section on Design within Dramatic Technique. Setting the setting is the place or places in which the fictional world of the play occurs, which may be represented by the set. Whilst the set is a real space, inhabited by actors, the setting is a fictional space, inhabited by characters. Sound effect a sound effect is any noise that is deliberately produced in the theatre during the performance of a play. Sound effects may be pre-recorded and mechanically reproduced, or created

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live by actors or technicians using objects, instruments or their own voices. Stage direction as well as the lines spoken by the characters, plays contain lines of stage direction, which give instructions to those producing the play. Stage directions are always written in italics to differentiate them from spoken lines. Stage directions that refer to the overall setting of the scene can usually be found in an opening paragraph to the scene, before the dialogue begins. Directions that suggest to actors how they might say a particular line, or make a particular gesture, are usually included in brackets within the corresponding line of dialogue. Subtext there are two ways for dramatists to reveal information about their characters and narrative. They can state information directly and explicitly in the text. For example, a character can tell another character what they are thinking or feeling, or about something that has happened to them in the past. However, relying too much on this sort of dialogue can lead to clunky and awkward writing. Playwrights are aware that, in real life, people do not always immediately tell each other what is bothering them or how they are feeling. Novelists often get round this problem by having narrators who explain the thoughts and feelings of characters, but again, this device can be awkward on stage. This has led dramatists to make frequent use of subtext, where a character’s dialogue says one thing directly, but may imply or suggest other things, through what is left unsaid or by the way the actor is instructed to say the lines. Understanding the subtext behind the text is vital to developing a comprehensive understanding of the play. Text the text of a play includes its dialogue and stage directions, along with other information provided by the playwright in the form of scene or character descriptions. Sometimes we distinguish between a ‘written text’, which we read from the pages of a book or script and a ‘performance text’, which we watch on a stage, and which encompasses a multitude of theatrical elements, such as lighting, costume and imagery. The job of the written text is to provide a blueprint from which to create this performance text.

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CHAPTER TWO

Behind the Scenes Charlotte Keatley (playwright) Charlotte Keatley is a playwright and journalist, and author of My Mother Said I Never Should. She was interviewed by Sophie Bush on 26 March 2015. SB: In 2000, the National Theatre chose My Mother Said I Never Should as one of its ‘100 Most Significant Plays of the Twentieth Century’. What did you make of this title? CK: My first reaction was that there were only nine living women on that list of 100. It was ridiculously unbalanced. It’s great that some of us were on it because its title suggests these plays defined the dramatic form for the last 100 years. Or radically remade the form, which is what I was trying to do. So I thought that was great, because they weren’t being categorized as plays by women, but as landmark plays. I think the most influential innovations in the ways play are structured, use of language and use of time, as well as new subjects, have been brought in by women playwrights over the last sixty years. Shelagh Delaney was far more groundbreaking than John Osborne, for example. But Osborne became acclaimed as one of the ‘Angry Young Men’ and written into academic records as a key new movement, while Shelagh Delaney is seen as a oneoff; a woman working-class playwright. From the 1970s, the 71

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huge blast of new energy coming into theatre was from women writing plays; I could name forty who’ve all been significant. But do you read about this in records of theatre? No. Theatre was written, acted and made by men for a good 2,000 years before women started writing plays, and I think we’re still seen as an aberration. Hopefully, this is changing, with a new generation now taking over the National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, and other big theatres. Directors and critics have to shift their attitude; there are still so few plays by women in the bigger theatres in the UK . I had a huge new play about civil war turned down by a major theatre because I was told there was only one slot for a play by a woman about war. Can you imagine a male playwright being told the equivalent? But this is a reason to keep writing and making theatre. SB: So, do you think that some of the issues My Mother Said raises about the career opportunities available to women are particularly relevant to women working in theatre and playwriting? CK: One thing I’ve been very aware of in the last ten years is that there are so few older female playwrights. It’s relatively easy to be a ‘bright young thing’, a ‘first play’ woman playwright. Luckily, when I was twenty-five I was savvy enough, having done lots of theatre criticism, to know the role they wanted me to play: to be terribly grateful and clap my hands and jump up and down that they were going to do my play. And I squirm when I read the way young women with plays about to go on at the Royal Court or at the National Theatre or somewhere are interviewed, because there’s still plenty of that. When I wrote My Mother Said, I believed it was a play that mattered. But for two years, directors and literary managers told me it wasn’t even a play, because of its structure and its all-female cast. Then, when it was staged, it was acclaimed for those same things. I had enough confidence that I didn’t overreact or under-react. I was more aware that, after your first

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play, there’s a lot of expectation. You can get lots of acclaim and media attention for being a ‘new’ playwright, but so many woman writers disappear by their late twenties, I think because the system doesn’t support a woman to go on developing and build a career. And I think that’s partly because the hours and all-consuming rehearsal process are very hard to manage if you’re bringing up children, but the bigger problem is what I said earlier: women still aren’t fundamentally seen as part of defining our theatre. At a subtle level, women playwrights aren’t given the status and support, the belief in their voice, and the commissions, that our culture gives to a promising young man. I’ve read three reviews in the last year of second or third plays by a youngish man, who’s compared with say David Hare, or David Edgar, and called ‘one of our leading playwrights’, while equivalent plays by a youngish woman aren’t put into that line-up, or reviewed as equally important to the theatre conversation in this country. Plays by women are still perceived as a one-off, and reviewed in isolation, when they should be seen as part of the dynasty too: we do have about three generations now. You can see the influence of My Mother Said and of other plays by women on the way women and men write now. As playwrights we learn from each other. SB: Do you think the significance of My Mother Said lies in the fact it so accurately captures a number of historical moments, or do you think it has a continued relevance to the issues and experiences of contemporary women? CK: It’s absolutely not a play of ‘historical moments’! It’s a play in which, in every scene, a woman makes a really important choice: to leave home or not, have a child or not, take up or give up a career, follow love or not. All these choices are part of everyone’s lives. My idea is that the audience watch these live choices happening in front of them, but because of the time structure, we may have already seen the result of that choice, which will affect the next generations.

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I knew some playwrights had experimented with time structure, like Arthur Miller or J.B. Priestly, but what’s still radical in My Mother Said is that all Act One scenes are ‘the present’. In other words, nothing is a flashback because there is no fixed present time; that only comes after Act Two. So it demands a playing style that says ‘this is Now! And this is Now!’ I chose the time and place of each scene to dramatize the huge changes in women’s opportunities across the twentieth century, but the choices within each scene turn out to be timeless. Theatre directors ask me why the play is incredibly popular with young people and I guess it’s because it dives into all these big life choices, and shows their impact. I get messages on social media, recently one from some Greek students, another from a young Muslim man in Manchester, saying how much the play means to them. Which is lovely, amazing; it’s what you wish for as a playwright, that you’ve got something that doesn’t age. I assume it’s because, in the dynamics of the relationships, there’s something there that actually doesn’t really change much per generation. Perhaps it’s also a play about finding your identity and voice, so young people may find it particularly empowering. I think it’s the same reason why it is performed abroad so much, even in countries like Japan where you would think, culturally, it was very different. A production springs to mind – one of my favourites ever – which was done in Prague, some years ago. I don’t speak a word of Czech, but it was one of the most moving I have ever seen. It so utterly belonged to that audience, and it so vividly spoke to them all at that moment. It was the early 1990s, not long after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and the most electrifying moment was when Jackie finds the dress Doris wore on her engagement day and holds it up, and Doris says nothing and turns away. In the English productions, she rejects that dress as her marriage was sad and bitter and lonely. But in the production in Prague, they did the opposite: Doris took the dress in her arms, almost like a person who she hadn’t seen for years, and held it to her front. And in that moment you felt the whole audience was able to reclaim the past they

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had been disconnected from because of communism. And it’s a brilliant example of how plays have to have spaces, and in those spaces, people make a play their own. SB: Do you think this sort of play could or would be written today? CK: I think today, women from about thirty downwards are trying very much to disengage, whether consciously or unconsciously, from being defined by motherhood or domestication, so their plays are very much about relationships, or quite international things: Lucy Prebble’s Enron and Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica, for example. We’re seeing more plays by women about power and concepts that would have once been seen as male territory, which is great. However, we still have to find ways to make women’s everyday lives part of the dramatic landscape and seen as political and significant in the way that men’s are. I was reading an article in the Guardian by a woman in her twenties living in London with her child who said, ‘As soon as you become a mother, you become a feminist’. I think it is then that it hits you that everyday life is still ludicrously difficult for mothers, in terms of access to work, and how you’re expected to behave. I was heartened, because you hear young women say, ‘I’m not a feminist’, and my heart sinks, because that doesn’t help anything. But you may not realize until you’re facing the problems of living and raising a child. SB: Do you think there’s a tendency amongst working women to feel that we’re not supposed to talk about how we manage more domestic things? CK: Yes, we don’t talk about the more difficult female experiences enough. I was thinking that women who don’t want to talk about motherhood are the Rosies who have grown up, but actually it’s more like they are stuck at Jackie’s stage, where you’re being a surrogate man in a way. You become very good at being one of the boys.

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SB: So, would you write the play any differently, if you were writing it today? CK: I couldn’t write it today! I’d be too aware of what I was doing. And having seen the reactions of women and men who are shocked and angered by the taboos being raised, I might pull back. Whereas, when I wrote it, I did so out of my own sense of the anger in women and how they turn it on each other, instead of using it to create change, which Rosie does, and Jackie to some extent. So I created the situations and characters and images which bring that anger, and those taboo feelings, to the surface. I think this could be part of why the play impassions people; it speaks what we may feel but haven’t acknowledged or been able to voice, in our families or in society. Likewise, the play seems to have a powerful effect in other countries where there are still very, very few plays by contemporary women: recent productions in Greece and Poland, for example. And when I say people, I mean men and women, boys and girls alike. I am really encouraged by how school-age boys see, appreciate and respect what their mothers do and the pressures on women. SB: Finally, who influenced you most as a playwright? CK: At university, I read Anton Chekov, Federico García Lorca and Sam Shepherd over and over, and felt I could learn everything from them. They go beyond naturalism into the unconscious, which is what I think good plays access. I also acted in plays, but there’d be twenty of us auditioning for the one or two female parts in most plays. I played a lot of maids, so I thought, let’s write some better parts for women, and different ones for men. But what gave me the courage to try is that, in the late 1970s, the names of playwrights started changing. I saw Sarah Daniels, Bryony Lavery, Caryl Churchill, Ann Devlin, Louise Page, Debbie Horsfield and Timberlake Wertenbaker among the vast range of men’s names on the Edinburgh Fringe, or in London and Manchester theatres. I

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vividly remember Sarah Daniels’s Ripen Our Darkness at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs: I was watching a woman character be furious and funny while putting something in the oven, and I remember being amazed: ‘so, this woman is allowed as a character in plays now!’ It’s hard to convey how unusual that was, then. I think Daniels was the bravest of all in terms of the taboos she broke in her plays, but she got the most vicious reviews I’ve ever read. Another influence was that, in the 1980s, I made performance art, set up a company, toured shows that worked and shows that were dreadful. I was exploring how to tell stories with image and object as much as words, which is still how I construct plays. It was seen as a new, ‘outsider’ art form to theatre plays, so perhaps it was easier to evolve my own way of making theatre there, because both women and men were inventing and defining performance art from the start. In the end, I think a truly ‘new’ play will be new in form as well as content; it is playwrights who reinvent theatre and we all have to look out for those plays and encourage them.

Brigid Larmour (director) Brigid Larmour is the artistic director of the Watford Palace Theatre. In 1987, she directed the first production of My Mother Said, as an associate director at Contact Theatre in Manchester, and she directed the play again in 2009 at Watford Palace. She was interviewed by Sophie Bush on 31 March 2015. SB: You must have got a lot of scripts sent to you when you were at Contact. What was it about Keatley’s play that caught your attention? BL: Charlotte came up to me in the theatre foyer and put it in my hand. I’d never read a play like it. It was a play that showed women and the way that women interact with each other in a way that I hadn’t seen on a theatre stage and it also played with

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structure in a way I’d never seen before. The way that it is non-linear; the way it went through time: that’s such a clever metaphor in a play about mothers and daughters, because when you’re a child, you look at your mother in a certain way, and if you have a child, you look at your daughter in a certain way, depending on how old you are and where you stand in that hierarchy. I thought that that was really interesting: the way you would look at somebody like Doris and think of her as an old woman, and then get to the end of the play and have this incredibly touching scene of her as a young, independent, confident woman. And I think also, it’s the poetry of it. It’s very theatrical; very visual; it’s got lots of theatrical imagery in it. It’s not bounded by naturalism, which is something I always find a bit tedious in plays. And it was very powerfully emotional. It was very moving reading it. SB: Were you surprised by the response Keatley had got previously to the play: people telling her it wasn’t a play because of its structure? BL: Yes, all of the gatekeepers of all the new writing theatres, all the big companies, all the national theatres, basically didn’t recognize it before they saw it on the stage and then everybody went, ‘Oh . . .’ It was a distinctively female point of view, a female kind of drama, and I think that one of the men who read it said nothing happened in it, because he didn’t realize what was going on just by looking at the text. SB: And did that surprise you, or were you used to that sort of short-sightedness from people in the theatre at that time; men in the theatre at that time? BL: Men in the theatre at that time divided into – and still do, to some extent – the ones who were open and interested in a female point of view (as indeed Anthony Clark was, who was the artistic director at Contact Theatre at that time, and gave us the slot to do the play) and people who were incredibly

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dismissive. I mean, there’s still a lot of sexism in the world, but there was a great deal more then. So it was enraging, but it wasn’t entirely surprising. One of the things that was incredibly touching when we first did it at Contact was the responsiveness of men to it when they saw it. They felt that they were seeing an aspect of the women they knew and loved that they had never seen before. Men in the audience were much more open than the professional artistic directors of the theatres had been. SB: Jumping forward twenty years, what made you think 2009 was the right moment to revisit the play with your production at Watford Palace? BL: I always wanted to do another production of it, because when you do the first production you are just sort of getting the play on and you’re partly discovering what the play is. It’s incredibly exciting, but it’s very interesting also to have another go when you’ve got more distance and you know a bit more in advance what you’re trying to do, rather than discovering it as you go along. And I thought that, whilst some people felt it was a period piece (as what was the present when we first did it was now very significantly the past), unfortunately, all of the issues that are addressed in the play are still very vivid and alive. And as a director, I had the desire to do it because it’s a very accessible play; it’s a play that can speak to everybody. You don’t have to be a theatre person or an academically clever person to love the play. At my theatre, we have a really wide demographic in our audience. I’m really proud of that. We serve all of our communities in Watford and I thought it would have a very broad appeal. The issues of family have a huge resonance in all cultures. And it’s just a wonderful play. And it’s got a small cast, so it’s not very expensive. And it’s got great roles for women. SB: Yes, it’s striking that, even thirty years later, that’s not always the case.

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BL: You wouldn’t believe the fuss that people made in the 1980s about the fact there were no men in it. It was ridiculous, if you think about all the centuries of plays with no women, or very few women. And suddenly, it was this very controversial thing that there were no men in the play! [People considered it] remarkable that it actually sustained itself. SB: You said a moment ago that all the issues in the play are still very present. Do you think we’ve moved on at all? BL: Well, clearly, we’ve moved on hugely. But in the last ten years, I think there was a bit of a backlash. I would hear younger women saying ‘I’m not a feminist’. People didn’t really talk about being feminist, and we were all supposed to pretend everything was okay, when actually, women are still being routinely murdered by their partners or ex-partners, women are trolled on Twitter, there’s still a glass ceiling in the City, but if we make a statement about it we get punished because we’re told we’ve got it all now and we should just shut up. So it’s been interesting seeing a new wave of activism around the 50/50 campaign about the representation of women on our stages.1 I found that really heartening although, of course, quite depressing, after thirty years, to be still having the same conversation. But it is a lot better. We have a lot more artistic directors of theatres who are women and a lot more playwrights in the West End and directors in the West End who are women (if we’re talking just narrowly about the theatre). I, for instance, am no longer called a woman director; I’m just a director, so that’s got to be progress. But, I think, in many ways, our society has become less equal, not just in terms of gender, but economically as well, and there seems to be a great deal of violence felt towards women, expressed on the internet, as well as out on our streets.

The Stage newspaper recently launched a campaign encouraging theatres to produce plays with equal numbers of male and female actors.

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SB: Did you find the 2009 audiences responded differently to the play, compared to the 1987 audiences? BL: I think it was revolutionary in the 1980s, so there was an excitement and a sense of wonder, but fortunately it has normalized itself. I felt that there were some people for whom it was still shocking, but it has become a classic. A lot of the people who came to see it had studied it at school, so they have an emotional connection with the text already. SB:

And was the critical response very different?

BL: It was very positively received both times. The first time it was a sort of ‘Oh my goodness, what on earth is this!’ response. People were very excited by it, but there was also a slight sense of being a performing dog; that here was something new. [People seemed surprised that] a play can be marvellous and not have any men in it, or a play can be exciting and not work through a logical, linear time frame. SB: Was the play’s structure really that unusual for its time? BL: Charlotte’s not the first person who’s experimented with time, but the degree of the lack of linear logic to it was very unusual. It’s a sort of poetic and intuitive logic, based on the emotional relationships and how they reflect on each other. Take the way that the scenes are put together: as she’s probably told you, we spent time where she lived with the scenes laid out, and we’d move them around and talk about whether it would be better if we moved one here, or this one went there, as it changes the meaning, a bit like the editing process of making a film, in a way. SB: In terms of your personal response to the play, did you feel that reading the play as an older woman changed your perspective on it?

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BL: I’ll tell you what I thought: I thought how on earth did she know so much when she was so young? I mean that’s the extraordinary thing about writers: how did she know that? I suppose that’s what an artist is: someone who knows something that they shouldn’t really possibly be able to know. I think I was probably more sympathetic towards Margaret the second time round. Or having said that, maybe it’s more that I was less sympathetic to Jackie. I think what I thought is that Margaret gets such a tough deal in the play. I mean, everyone else sort of makes their way through it, one way or another, and she doesn’t, so I think I just felt the sadness of that more this time round. SB: And do you think, correspondingly, if you were going to be more sympathetic towards Margaret, you had to be less sympathetic towards Jackie? BL: I don’t think so, no. I think, probably, I just saw it more from Jackie’s point of view when I was younger. Somehow Rosie and Doris transcend that, as indeed sometimes the very old and the very young can. SB: Yes, I think we tend to excuse almost everything that Doris does because of her generation, and anything Rosie does because she is still really a child at the end of the play. Margaret and Jackie have to take more responsibility for what they do, but is it problematic that we make them do that? BL: Well, it’s a drama, isn’t it? So there’s no right or wrong, in that sense. People are just struggling with these impossible choices. There are these characters that don’t really exist and we debate them as if they are real people. SB: Yes, one of the things students are warned about is not to write about the characters as real people, but as dramatic constructs. But whilst it is obviously very important to look at how Keatley has created them, in a way it is nice that they are

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so three-dimensional that our tendency is to think and talk about them as real people. BL: Yes. They are a family, and the way the play is written gets you very emotionally involved with them. And you see them, as it were, backstage. You don’t see, always, a big public set-piece; you see people potting geraniums and private moments.

Louisa Warde (teacher) Louisa Warde is an English and drama teacher at King Edward VII School in Sheffield. As such, she regularly works on the text with groups of students, and directed the play as a school production in 2003. She was interviewed by Sophie Bush on 24 February 2015. SB:

What attracted you to direct this play at your school?

LW: I really wanted to do something that gave women – or girls – the opportunity to take on some important roles that were complex and interesting. And I really liked the idea of a play that, although it talked about men, really was focusing on the women in these relationships, rather than women being auxiliary characters who just supported the male characters. At the time, there were a number of strong girls that I knew had chosen not to audition for plays that the school had done before, who fancied doing something a bit more ‘gritty’, for want of a better word. Something that spoke more to them and to the situations they were in. I wanted to appeal to a slightly different type of student than the students who had always auditioned for school productions in the past. SB: My Mother Said is usually performed by adults, who pretend to be children in some scenes. How does a young cast, who have to play ages they have never experienced or lived through, affect the dynamic of the play?

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LW: What we had to do was encourage them to take on a level of personal research and introspection, which any actor would do, but I think it needed to be a bit more guided in terms of trying to get out of them how it would feel to be this little kid when they’re not a little kid, and then this adult, and then, in Doris’s case, a much older adult. And that was tricky, actually, and it all came down to casting, especially for the character of Doris, as that is such a challenge to get somebody who is quite young to be able to play such an old and learned character, who has learned so much over her life and is tired. And the fact that they had to play them at different stages in their lives as well, as you’ve got to act in the same way, but to add the nuances to say, ‘well, it’s the same character, but now this character is sixty, now this character is forty’: that’s not easy. SB: Do you think the play has the same level of resonance or relevance for young women today, compared to when it was written in the 1980s? LW: I think in a way it’s got a different relevance, because in the 1980s it was really looking at: ‘This is how far we’ve come. Where are women now? Where is women’s place in society now? We’ve still got a major fight.’ And I think a lot of students now, their first glance at it would be: ‘we don’t have those issues now’, but I think the important thing for someone who is guiding students, is getting them to recognize that there are still similar issues; it’s just not quite the same. I think it’s important also for male and female – but particularly female – students to be able to look back and see what things were like not that long ago at all and actually start thinking about how that affects their predicament now and the situation they’re in now. SB: Yes, I think it would be naïve to assume, given how long is portrayed in the play, and how little actually changes, that by now everything would be okay.

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LW: But I think that is a common perception. Even by young women now. SB: You said it’s important for male and female students to look at these issues. When you’ve been working on this play, have you only worked on it with women, or have you worked on it with classes that included boys? LW: I have only worked on it with women, but one of the activities that I always do when we’re preparing a practical piece for performance is to get feedback throughout from the rest of the class. So boys have seen it, and we’ve talked about it, and obviously they’ve had opinions on certain bits. SB:

And how have you found they’ve tended to respond to it?

LW: It depends which bit you’re showing them. The little girl scenes, especially the ones where they’re playing doctors and things like that, the initial response from boys is embarrassment. SB: That is really evident in the responses of some male reviewers of the 1989 Royal Court production; whereas, female critics tended to respond more positively to those scenes. LW: But actually [the embarrassed response is] the same with girls initially, and that’s what I love about the play and about teaching it, because it is a case of, when you first show an extract to students, whether they are boys or girls, they tend to wrinkle their nose and say they don’t get it, and say, ‘well how old are they there?’, and ‘why are they the same person?’, and then it’s just about unlocking little bits for them, for them to start understanding and seeing the different layers that there are in it, and that’s really interesting to see in front of you with the girls that are working on it. I remember an interesting response from one of the boys. I think it was the bit when Jackie and Rosie had come back from holiday, and one of the boys was saying he didn’t understand

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what the problem was. He didn’t get what the problem was between Jackie and Margaret and I remember him saying ‘it’s just girls being bitchy’, and then that opened up some girls to say ‘that’s not the case’ and it was quite an interesting discussion for a while, following on from the way the boy saw it, which was just, ‘This is silly. Why are they fighting about this? Why can’t they all just be mates?’ SB: What are the most important things for GCSE English literature students to remember when they are writing about drama? LW: I think the most important thing that I always say to students, when they’re looking at a drama, is: audience response. And with plays it is about how you create that audience response. How do you create these effects? How do you use all the practical tools you’ve got at your disposal? So, you’ve got an understanding of a character – interpretation if you like, as it can be varied depending on who the character is and who the student is interpreting it – but then you must must take it to the next level of how you get that across. I think that’s really important. What do you want your audience to feel and how do you get that across in the way it should be directed? But also, what’s intrinsic to that is recognizing, as you always do with English literature, the culture and the period it belongs to and therefore how an audience response might be changed, depending on which audience you’re talking about. SB: And do you find there are particular mistakes you see commonly with the way students write about drama? LW: Yes. I think it’s hard for students to move on from a very theory-based literary approach, where they talk about the character, but not about the character as if it’s a piece of drama. I also think students often end up talking about characters as if they’re real people, and that’s just so important: that they remember that it’s a deliberate construct. It goes back to what

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I was saying about how you create the desired effect. There is a desired effect. It’s not just that this person is like this because they are like that: it’s the playwright’s craft and what they’ve chosen. It’s deliberate and it’s to create a certain effect. And often you do get students just totally forgetting that level. They need to grasp that it is a character and it is characterization; it’s not just a person.

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CHAPTER THREE

Writing About the Play Although the specific questions asked in examinations will change year on year, overall they will be consistent in asking you to demonstrate certain key skills and knowledge about the text you have studied. For example, you will always need to be able to show that you can: ●

Develop an informed personal response to the text. This means that you will need to have your own opinions about the text, but that these must be firmly rooted in the evidence given by the text itself and any additional reading and studying you have done.

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Illustrate your interpretations of the text with appropriate evidence from the text. Choosing the right moments in the play to reference and selecting appropriate quotations from the text are vital if you are to provide a convincing argument in support of your personal response.

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Analyse the key features of the text you have studied, demonstrating how the playwright creates meaning and effect within their work, by examining their use of language, structure and other dramatic techniques.

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Suggest connections between a text and the period in which it was written (its context). You might consider the possible influences of the times on the writer, as 89

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well as what the critical, or public, response to the work tells us about its period. ●

Maintain an appropriately formal written style throughout your work, using appropriate vocabulary and subject terminology, and standard spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Developing your personal response It might seem an obvious point, but there is not a lot a study guide can tell you about your personal response to a play! This is where it is very important that you allow yourself time to develop your own opinion. There are a number of things you can do to assist this. Most important is reading the text through carefully, but also useful is acting out some of the scenes with friends or classmates so you can experience what it is like to be in each character’s shoes. Small or whole group discussions will also help you to develop your ideas about, and responses to, the play. You should never be afraid to contribute to such conversations, or to offer an opinion that is different to those of your classmates, or even your teacher! The whole point of literature and drama is that it is open to multiple interpretations, many of which cannot be considered wholly right or wholly wrong. Of course, some interpretations of the text are more appropriate than others, and listening to other people’s views – especially your teacher’s – should help you notice alternative ways to consider the text. As a general rule, though, if you can provide evidence from the text to support your interpretation, then that interpretation should be at least partially valid. English teacher, Louisa Warde, recommends basing your interpretations around three key areas of response: ●

The purpose or function of a certain extract or character.

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The thematic significance or ‘message’ of an extract of text.

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The mood or atmosphere generated within an extract and the possible responses this may provoke from an audience.

Finding evidence in the text Consider these questions in relation to Act One, Scene Two of the play: 1 2 3

What lines or sections of text show us that Doris and Margaret have a strained relationship? What lines or sections of text show us that Doris loves Margaret? What lines or sections of text reveal that Doris has a strained relationship with her husband, Jack?

The answers to these questions reveal several different ways in which we can find evidence in different parts of the text, such as the following.

1. In the dialogue Here we can find some answers to our first question. For example, in Act One, Scene Two, Doris talks about ‘duty’ and all her opening lines to Margaret are instructions: ‘come out!’ ‘I’ve told you before!’ ‘Will you listen!’ (9). Note that all these lines end with exclamation marks, which are instructions to the actor to say these lines firmly or sharply, or even to shout them. Doris scolds Margaret repeatedly, essentially for not being ladylike or accomplished enough: for saying ‘knickers’, for creasing her freshly ironed dress, for wanting to play ‘Ten Very Easy Carols’ rather than Beethoven on the piano. When Margaret, attempting to please her mother by playing the Beethoven, starts ‘swaying with passion’, Doris scolds her again: ‘We’ll have less passion and more perseverance, please’ (10).

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It seems Margaret can do nothing right, as far as Doris is concerned; Doris even corrects Margaret’s grammar from ‘Can’t we’ to ‘Mayn’t we’ (12). Towards the end of the scene, Margaret is clearly frightened and confused by the air raid, asking ‘Does Hitler fly over our house?’, ‘Will we win the war?’ and ‘What happens when you die?’ (12); but Doris evades these questions, with tongue-in-cheek responses (‘You never know’, ‘Not if you don’t keep quiet and go to sleep’), or by changing the subject (‘I’ll bring you some cocoa presently’) (12). In the second part of the scene, set in 1961, the strain in Doris and Margaret’s relationship is still evident, particularly in Doris’s disapproval of Margaret’s taste in plastic furniture.

2. In the characters’ actions It is important that we do not forget what the characters do, as well as what they say. Despite the problems in their relationship, Doris does show some tenderness towards Margaret, tucking her into her makeshift bed and making sure she has a Christmas stocking to hang under the piano. Overall, the impression we get is that Doris is not unkind, or unloving, just emotionally stilted. If we forgot to consider Margaret’s actions, and only listened to her words, we might miss this crucial detail. Sometimes the characters’ actions are described in the play’s stage directions, such as ‘Margaret hangs her Christmas stocking on the piano’, but sometimes we have to interpret them from what the characters say. For example, when Doris says, ‘Tuck you up . . . tuck you in’, we can assume that that is what she is doing (11).

3. In the subtext The answer to question three is harder to find, because it is not directly revealed in the text, like the answers above, but indirectly implied in the subtext of the play. Subtext is information we can pick up by ‘reading between the lines’ of the play, or working

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out something that is left unsaid, based on what is said. For example, in this scene, Margaret innocently tells her mother, ‘Gillian’s Mother and Father sleep in one bed, not two’ (11). At first glance, this does not seem to tell us anything about the characters in the play, just about Margaret’s friend Gillian and her parents, who we never meet. However, Margaret’s line is expressed as a point of comparison: ‘Gillian’s Mother and Father sleep in one bed, not two’ (my emphasis). From this, we can guess that Margaret is comparing Gillian’s parents to her own, and consequently that Doris and Jack sleep in two separate beds.

Using quotations When you use a quotation in your work, it is important to be clear about where it comes from and who is saying it. You may want to begin your sentence with a phrase that locates the reader, such as ‘In Act One, Scene Two, Margaret says . . .’ You may also need this opening phrase to tell the reader who the character is speaking to. For example, ‘In Act One, Scene Two, Margaret tells her mother . . .’. In an examination in which you do not have access to the text, you may find it easier to locate a quotation within a particular moment of the play, rather than specifying the exact scene it comes from. For example, you may say something like, ‘In the scene in which Jackie gives Rosie to Margaret . . .’, or ‘Whilst the characters are celebrating Rosie’s tenth birthday’, or even ‘Towards the end of the play . . .’. Next, you need to make sure the quotation makes the point you want it to, by making this explicitly clear to the reader. This means providing an explanation of what the quotation reveals. For example, you might say something like, ‘In this line, Margaret reveals that she is frightened about the air raid’, or ‘Here, Doris fails to respond to Margaret’s fear by changing the subject’. Whilst you should always explain the value of your quotation in this way, it is not necessary to narrate

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your own thought process. For example, there is no need to say things like ‘I have chosen this quotation to demonstrate that Margaret is frightened’; by using the quotation and explaining its value, you make it clear that this is what you have done. Remember that, in an examination, you may have to quote briefly from the text from memory. The best way to learn quotations is to act out scenes from the play, so that you gradually learn its lines as an actor would. Although it is best practice to quote the text accurately, if, under the pressure of exam conditions, you cannot remember the exact wording of a line from the text that you want to use, it is better to try to quote what you do remember and get the wording slightly wrong, than not quote at all. As part of your revision process, try learning certain quotations that can be used to illustrate a range of ideas and concepts, or key traits of each character. For example, you could learn one of the lines in which Doris uses an old-fashioned word to illustrate how Keatley uses language to differentiate character, or pick something that Jackie tells us about her job to discuss the theme of women’s work options.

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hoose and learn some quotations that illustrate:

1 Each of the themes discussed in the Themes section of this guide. 2 A key trait of each of the play’s characters. 3 Key moments of tension or disagreement between the characters.

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Analysing the playwright’s technique Examination criteria require you to analyse how the playwright creates both meaning and effect. In other words, you need to look at what they are communicating to an audience and how they are doing that. For example, in Act One, Scene Five, it is gradually revealed that Margaret has had a miscarriage. Doris knows this, but nine-year-old Jackie has clearly been given a partial version of the truth. The first sign that something has happened is when Jackie asks Margaret, ‘Are you better?’ Margaret’s surprised response, ‘Better? (Looks at Doris.) Mother . . .’ reveals that there is more to the situation than first meets the eye (21). As an audience, we start to suspect, but we do not yet know. We get further clues when Doris mentions iron tablets, suggests Margaret has been ‘nursed’ by her husband during their trip to the Lake District, and hopes she ‘didn’t do too much walking’ whilst they were there. The situation is all but confirmed with Margaret’s line: ‘I thought I didn’t want it, till I lost it’ (22). By now, most members of the audience will have guessed what ‘it’ is, and anyone who has not gets a further prompt from Margaret’s distressed response to Jackie talking about mothering her doll. However, the matter is not made explicitly clear until the very end of the scene, when Doris says, ‘If you hadn’t been so hasty to get that temping job, you would never have lost the baby’ (23). In this way, Keatley gradually generates the meaning that Margaret has had a miscarriage, and simultaneously creates the effect of foreboding, as we begin to suspect what has happened before this is confirmed. This also creates the effect that we, as an audience, feel clever and pleased with ourselves for working this out before we are explicitly told.

Writing about character You may be asked to consider how a character is presented within one scene of the play, or to consider a character’s

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journey across the course of the whole play. These two things are very different. Within a single scene, a character will usually have been constructed to appear quite consistent. They will often have an objective to achieve within the scene, although they might be required to try out a number of different tactics to achieve that objective. For example, in Act One, Scene Two, you could read Margaret’s objective as the desire to keep Doris in the room with her, and Doris’s objective as the desire to get Margaret to bed and to sleep. You can then see the characters’ different actions within the scene as tactics designed to achieve these objectives. For example, Doris tucks Margaret in, goes to make her cocoa, and warns her that they might not win the war if ‘you don’t keep quiet and go to sleep’ (12). Conversely, Margaret asks a succession of questions designed to keep her mother’s attention. As is the case here, drama often works on the premise that the objectives of different characters will be in tension or opposition with one another, and the resulting conflict is what creates the drama.

Things to do

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efine the characters’ differing objectives in some other scenes from the play. You can do this with any scene, but some good examples to use might be Act One, Scenes Four and Five and Act Three, Scenes Two and Five.

Looking at a character’s journey over the course of a play is quite different, particularly when considering a play with an epic structure like My Mother Said. This is because, whilst a character will often behave consistently within a single scene, people (and therefore believable dramatic characters) do not always behave consistently over longer periods of time. It is therefore your job to notice how characters change and develop over the course of a play, and how the playwright

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reveals this to us. For example, we hear a young Margaret exclaim that she does not want a family in Act One, Scene Seven, but witness an older Margaret raise her daughter and granddaughter throughout much of the rest of the play. Outlining how a character’s attitude towards certain issues, or other characters, differs across the course of the play is a good way to highlight character development. Whilst preparing this book, one thing that kept coming up when I spoke to teachers or examiners about things students need to remember was the importance of writing about characters as dramatic constructs, not as though they are real people. Therefore, whilst you should consider how each character behaves, the experiences that have shaped them and the relationships they form, you should always show an awareness of how the playwright reveals these things to the audience. In order to gather your thoughts about character, you might consider creating a number of character profiles. The following template gives some prompts that should help you remember to consider the way characters are constructed, though you may want to add other questions or categories you think are important.

Example character profile Character’s name Age: • in wasteground scenes • at first appearance outside wasteground scenes • at final appearance in play • range depicted over course of play

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Key relationships with onstage characters

Key relationships with offstage characters

What do I do on stage?

What do I say about myself?

What do I say about other characters?

What do other characters say to me?

What do other characters say about me?

In which scenes is my status high?

In which scenes is my status low?

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Constructing an argument To provide a coherent and focused response to an exam or essay question, you need to construct and maintain an argument in response to the question that is being asked. In everyday conversation, the word ‘argument’ is usually used to describe a disagreement or quarrel, but in academic writing the word refers to a set of reasons given in support of an idea. An academic argument should provide a combination of reasoning and evidence, which works to persuade the reader or listener of the argument’s truth or appropriateness. The first step towards creating a successful argument is to plan your work thoroughly. You need to think about the point, or points, you want to make, and what will be the best way to make them, before you begin writing. In a timed examination, you may feel under a lot of pressure to start writing as soon as your time starts, but taking ten minutes to think through and plan your response to the question is likely to enable you to provide a much clearer and stronger answer. Your plan should outline the overall thrust of your argument, as well as the key steps that will take you through it. For example, if a question is focused on the relationship between two characters over the course of the play, your plan should identify what you consider the key aspects of this relationship to be, and the scenes, or moments from scenes, that you will draw on to develop and illustrate these aspects.

Moving from description to analysis The most straightforward response you can have to a play (or indeed any artwork) is to describe it. This is an important stage in your response to the work, but one that should lead into more developed academic responses, such as analysis and evaluation. Description means saying what you can see, hear or read. For example, you can describe the fact that Doris wears a beige skirt

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in Act One, Scene Seven of the play. However, this description or observation only really carries any value if you can use it to lead into a point of analysis or evaluation. Analysis means offering a suggestion as to what your description/observation might mean or signify within the context of the play. For example, you might suggest that Doris’s beige skirt helps to communicate the staid, old-fashioned nature of her character. Whereas a description is usually unambiguous and objective, an analysis may be more individual; there may be several ways to analyse or interpret the same description. Evaluation means adding a level of critical judgement to your analysis. For example, you might say that the specification of a beige skirt for Doris in this scene is an effective way to communicate character, particularly when viewed alongside Margaret’s contrasting costume. Because each of these stages (description, analysis, evaluation) is progressively more subjective and open to multiple interpretations, it is important that you provide evidence to support them.

Things to do Take the following descriptive statements and use them as a basis for further analysis and evaluation: 1

In the opening of Act One, Scene Two, Doris is listening to a George Formby song on the radio.

2

During Act Two, Margaret tells Jackie they can talk whilst they pack up the house.

3

Margaret’s doll Suky first appears in Act One, Scene Two. In Act One, Scene Five, we hear that Jackie has been playing with it. In Act One, Scene Ten, it is buried by Rosie.

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Connecting text to context All dramatic and literary texts, indeed all works of art, can be seen as a product of their times. Artists and writers may sometimes give off the impression that they shut themselves away from the mundane reality of the world and take their inspiration from something purer or more mysterious, but in actuality no work is created in such a vacuum, and everything bears traces of its history. It is impossible to appreciate the full value of Keatley’s work if you ignore such things as the opportunities available to women when the play was written, and during the various periods in which it is set. However, you should be careful not to over-state such connections, remembering always that the play is a dramatic fiction, not a history book. You can suggest certain influences that may have informed the writer, but you should not claim to know authorial intent, unless you can back this up with a direct quotation. Ideally, you should refer to elements of context, as and when relevant, throughout your work, rather than in a separate paragraph. Remember that you are trying to demonstrate how context is integrally linked to the play, so it should be discussed in this way, not as something separate that can be disconnected.

Things to do

I

magine you are encountering Act One, Scene Seven for the first time, without knowing anything about the play it was from. What parts of the scene would you not understand or appreciate without additional knowledge? What contextual information would improve your understanding of the scene?

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Writing with appropriate formality Written English has a more formal quality than spoken English, so be careful not to lapse into your spoken voice halfway through a piece of written work. Of course, in the play you are studying, characters may speak informally to one another, and use slang and dialect words, which you may draw attention to, using quotations, but your own discussion of the text should maintain a formal tone and standard spelling, punctuation and grammar. Here are some key things to remember: ●

Make sure you are always writing in complete sentences, which make full sense and contain a subject (the thing the sentence is about) and a main verb (what you are noting that thing to be doing). For example, ‘The play (subject) presents (verb) a number of motherdaughter relationships’. Be careful not to switch the subject or tense of your sentence halfway through. You should use the present tense when writing about moments in the play. For example, ‘Doris polishes the piano’, not ‘Doris polished the piano’. However, you may need to use past tense when referring to elements of the play’s context. For example, ‘During the Second World War, Manchester experienced heavy bombing’.

●

Particularly if you have trouble writing with clarity, break your work down into shorter, clearer sentences, rather than running your ideas together into very long ones, which can easily become confusing for the reader.

●

Write in paragraphs, starting a new one every time you start to discuss the next key point within your work.

●

Take note of the mistakes you are inclined to make by looking over your previous work. If there are spellings you often get wrong, or types of punctuation you

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struggle to use correctly, the only real solution is to take the time and effort to learn how to use them. ●

When you are writing about the play, you are asked to develop a personal response, which requires you to consider how you think and feel about the text, and recognizes that you are an individual with your own, valid opinions. However, when you collect your thoughts into a written response, as in an essay or exam question, you need to communicate the end result, and not the process, of all your thinking and feeling about the play. Therefore, writing in the third person can help you to express your ideas more succinctly. For example, you might have come to the conclusion that Margaret’s inability to respond to Jackie’s emotional needs has occurred because of Doris’s failure to respond to Margaret’s emotional needs. But if you want to express this point, it might be better to say, ‘Margaret’s inability to respond to Jackie’s emotional needs, as evidenced by her dismissal of Jackie’s attempts to talk to her in Act Two, seems rooted in her own experience of being dismissed by her mother, Doris, in Act One, Scene Two’, than to say ‘I think that Margaret’s inability to respond to Jackie’s emotional needs in Act two is connected to her own experience, because in an earlier scene, Doris treats Margaret the same way’. The first example is more authoritative because it assumes the reader will agree with the statement without needing to qualify it with the phrase ‘I think’. The reader still knows and understands that the following statement is your opinion because they are reading your work, and they are happy to take your word for it, as long as you back the statement up with convincing evidence from the text.

Overall, the best way to develop a clear and formal written style is to read widely and gradually pick up how other writers structure and phrase things. In addition to this, you should

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always try to leave enough time to proofread your work, as it is easy to make errors, particularly under the pressure of examination conditions.

Final thoughts There may well be times, during your studies, when you get frustrated with having to think or write any more about this play, and stressed at the prospect of having to remember quotations from it and decide what to say about them in an exam. At these times, remember Keatley’s comment that this is ‘a play about finding your identity and voice’; and remember that, through your studies, you have earned yourself the right to exercise that voice and join these conversations about the play.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anon (n.d.) ‘Manchester Blitz’. Imperial War Museum [online]. Available at: http://archive.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ ConWebDoc.2790, accessed: 3 February 2015. Anon (n.d.) ‘1954: Housewives celebrate end of rationing’. On This Day, BBC [online]. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/ hi/dates/stories/july/4/newsid_3818000/3818563.stm, accessed: 13 March 2015. Aristotle (1996) Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. London, Penguin Books. Armistead, Claire (1989) Review of My Mother Said at the Royal Court, Financial Times, 4 March 1989. Bates, Laura (2014) Everyday Sexism. London, Simon & Schuster. Billington, Michael (2007) State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945. London, Faber & Faber. Billington, Michael (1989) Review of My Mother Said at the Royal Court, The Guardian, 4 March 1989. Churchill, Caryl (1982) Top Girls. London, Methuen. Delaney, Shelagh (2014) A Taste of Honey. London, Methuen Drama. Gardner, Lyn (1989) Review of My Mother Said at the Royal Court, City Limits, 9 March 1989. Keatley, Charlotte (1994) My Mother Said I Never Should. London, Methuen Drama. Keatley, Charlotte (2012) Our Father. London, Methuen Drama. Keatley, Charlotte (2016) My Mother Said I Never Should. London, Bloomsbury. Macdonald, Sharman (1985) When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout. London, Faber & Faber. Shulman, Milton (1989) Review of My Mother Said at the Royal Court, Evening Standard, 6 March 1989. Spencer, Charles (1989) Review of My Mother Said at the Royal Court, Daily Telegraph, 16 March 1989.

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Stephenson, Heidi and Langridge, Natasha (1997) Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting. London, Methuen. Taylor, Paul (1989) Review of My Mother Said at the Royal Court, Independent, 6 March 1989. Willet, John (1967) The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. London, Methuen.

INDEX action 2, 55–8, 66, 92, 96 activities/things to do 15–17, 33, 37, 40, 42, 44, 49, 50, 60, 94, 96, 100, 101 Attenborough, Michael 10 Brecht, Bertolt 45 Chekhov, Anton 67 Chimerica 75 Churchill, Caryl 11–12, 59, 63–4, 76 Clark, Anthony 78 Cloud Nine 11 competition 25–6 38, 41 Contact Theatre 77–9, 10 contraception 14, 20 22, 24 costume 2–3, 16, 52–3, 66–7, 69, 100 Daniels, Sarah 76–7 Delaney, Shelagh 11, 63, 71 Devlin, Ann 76 Doris 3–10, 13–14, 20–9, 30–3, 34–43, 46–8, 50–7, 74, 78, 82, 84, 91–3, 95, 96, 99–100, 103 dramatic irony 5, 67 Dukes, The 11 Dunbar, Andrea 12

Enron 75 examinations 46–7, 89–97, 99–104 fathers 20, 24, 28, 29, 38, 40, 41, 48, 61, 65, 93 feminism 11, 17–20, 75, 80, foreshadowing 10, 25, 27, 67 Grace of Mary Traverse, The 12 Graham 29, 40, 48 Horsfield, Debbie 76 Jack 7, 9–10, 24, 29, 30–3, 54–5, 91–3 Jackie 3–10, 14–15, 18, 20–9, 31–6, 37–40, 40–3, 46–8, 51–6, 60, 63–4, 75, 76, 82, 85–6, 95, 103 jealousy and resentment 4, 24–6, 33, 58–9 Jellicoe, Ann 11 Ken 5, 7, 19, 29, 33, 36, 37, 41 King Edward VII School, Sheffield 83 Kirkwood, Lucy 75 Knack, The 11 language 33, 47–9, 89, 91–2, 94, 102–4

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Lavery, Bryony 76 Leach, Amy 11 lighting 2–3, 50–1, 67, 69, Lorca, Frederico Garcia 76 Macdonald, Sharman 12, 64–5 Margaret 3–10, 13–14, 18, 20–32, 33–7, 38–43, 46–8, 50–7, 59, 64, 82, 91–7, 103 Masterpieces 12 miscarriage 4, 24, 26, 30–1, 34, 95 Monstrous Regiment 11 Motherhood abandoning motherhood 15, 23, 27, 37–40 choosing motherhood 20–2 mother–daughter relationships 14–15, 23–9, 30–42, 48, 52–7, 58–9, 63–6, 78, 91–2 unmarried motherhood/ illegitimacy 15, 23, 26–7, 30, 55, 63 narrative 2, 44–5, 66, 67 National Theatre 11, 71–2 naturalism 3, 49, 50, 65, 66, 67, 68, 76, 78 objectives 37, 66, 67, 96 Our Father 65–6 Page, Louise 76 performance art 77 post-war Britain 13–14, Prebble, Lucy 75 props 2–3, 53–5, 68

Punshon, Sarah 11 quotations 89, 93–4, 101, 102 realism 3, 48, 52, 68 repetition 27–9 reviews 26, 45, 47, 58–62, 73, 79, 85 Ripen Our Darkness 77 Rita, Sue and Bob Too 12 Rosie 4–9, 12–13, 21–39, 40–3, 46–8, 52–4, 57–8, 64, 76, 82 Royal Court Theatre 10, 26, 47, 58–62, 72, 77, 85 secrets and lies 9, 26–7, 46, 54, 57–8, 59 set 3, 49–50, 65, 68 setting 1–10, 13–16, 18, 20, 49–52, 63, 68, 101 Shepherd, Sam 76 Simon 39 sound 2–3, 13–14, 18–19, 40, 51–2, 68 Sport of My Mad Mother, The 11 stage directions 1–2, 16, 21, 41, 54, 55, 56, 68, 69, 92 Stanislavski, Constantin 67 structure 2, 29–30, 44–7, 58, 64, 66, 67, 71–4, 78, 81, 89, 96 subtext 39, 69, 92–3 Taste of Honey, A 11, 63 Thatcher, Margaret 12, 15 Top Girls 12, 59, 63–4 Vinegar Tom 11

INDEX

Warde, Louisa 16, 43, 62, 83–7, 90 Watford Palace Theatre 11, 65, 77, 79 When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout 12, 64–5 work and careers 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 20–2, 24–5,

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28–9, 31, 34–6, 38, 42, 52–3, 57, 59, 63–4, 72–3, 75 World War Two 13–15, 20, 34, 51–2, 92, 96 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 12, 76 West Yorkshire Playhouse 11 Women’s Theatre Group 11

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