My Mother Said I Never Should (Student Editions)

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My Mother Said I Never Should is a play that has not only stood the test of time, but continues to be extremely popular. Has the play’s enduring appeal surprised you at all? Why do you think its popularity has continued? The bond of mother-daughter has been stretched to the limit, I think, by changes in women’s lives that are far greater than those in men’s lives in the past 100 years. It’s dramatic. The great thing is that when we become aware of the choices we’ve made, we can change them if we want. And it is never too late to show someone that you love them. Charlotte Keatley studied drama at the Victoria University of Manchester and as a postgraduate at the University of Leeds. She has worked as a journalist for Performance magazine, the Yorkshire Post, the Financial Times and the BBC. She co-devised and performed in 'Dressing for Dinner', staged at the Theatre Workshop, Leeds, in 1983, and set up the performance art company, Royal Balle, in 1984. She was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow in English at Cambridge University in 1989 and Writer in Residence for the New York Stage and Film Company in 1991. The performers skilfully navigate Keatley’s nonlinear chronology, but Draper’s production somewhat clunkily indicates the shifts in time with era-appropriate album covers shown on a screen above the stage – for the Sex Pistols and Madonna – accompanied by the corresponding music. These transitions are often drawn out, adding extra time to a play that already feels longer than it needs to be. After opening with a burst of boisterous energy, the production becomes increasingly sluggish.

More than 30 years after its premiere, My Mother Never Said I Should is still pertinent. Exhorted to “have it all”, many women remain saddled with the double shift of work and domestic duties, and have to face wrenching decisions about motherhood and career. In this version, fingersmiths also suggests how the lives of deaf women have changed over several generations, adding a new dimension to a much-produced play. This ordinary and important fact is at the heart of Charlotte Keatley's play. It is what gives it its universal appeal. And the play's dislocated structure reminds us that the adult carries the baggage of the child. They are the same person. The play has a non-chronological and non-linear structure and moves between different places (Manchester, Oldham, and London) and time periods. It presents various episodes in the lives of the four female characters between the 1920s to 1987. It also features scenes set in "the wasteground", where the four characters play together as their child selves in their own contemporary costumes. Do you remember how you felt before the very first performance of My Mother Said I Never Should? Can you give us an insight? The play has frequently been revived internationally. [3] It was for many years the most performed drama by a female playwright, until it was overtaken by The Vagina Monologues. [4] Awards and nominations [ edit ]Sophia Lovell Smith’s set is half playground, half home, suggesting the domestic cares and burdens of these women and the submerged playfulness of their youth. A big slide cascades down one side of the stage, yet its surface is covered in pristine carpet; the friction of home and hearth brings headlong fantasies to a halt. As the play moves between scenes of childish imagination and the reality of adulthood, we see how often the protagonists’ ambitions shrink over time.

Music is used to evoke era and atmosphere in My Mother Said I Never Should. This is the case in a number of Keatley’s other works, notably The Singing Ringing Tree, a 1991-2 musical for children based on European folk tales. She has subsequently had a busy schedule writing for radio and television dramas, as well as in teaching theatre workshops throughout the UK and internationally. She has done a good deal of work in and for schools. She wrote and co-directed Forest, her 2001 play for teenagers in Burnley, and The First Pirate Queen for Withington Girls’ School in Manchester during 2005.Fiz Marcus, who was to play Doris, has unfortunately had to withdraw from the tour due to unforeseen health issues. The role of Doris will now be played by Carole Dance. Doris disapproves of her swinging in rhythm to the piano, and implies that she isn’t good enough, and that she should “be on Beethoven by now”. Doris seems ashamed of not having Christmas decorations or an Anderson Shelter, and leaves Margaret under the piano. Dad’s done everything. He’s been brilliant, like it was before they split up. He knew where Mum kept that box that’s got all the family stuff in it. He said I could have this one. That’s Mum holding me by the front door when I’d just arrived... And... Here’s Mum’s birth certificate,... and here’s mine. So now I know. Scene 3 takes place in the waste ground, this time with only Doris and Rosie as children. They play doctors and nurses, and discuss their primitive ideas about sex and relationships after they hear that their mother has ‘the curse’.

As parents we wrestle with how much of our own value system to pass on, and are confronted with what we’ve made of our lives, when we bring up a child, or choose not to. This is still a pivotal decision in women’s lives: look how media comment on whether women politicians, Olympic athletes, film stars, company managers etc have children or not, how they manage that or not. Men aren’t defined by this. This play comes out of watching the new opportunities and pressures on women which I saw in the 1970s and 80s. I had far more choice as a 25-year-old than the 80-year-old woman next door ever had for her life. What would I do? Would I ever manage to be a mother? What relationships would I have? I set about inventing four generations of women who all made different choices. I think it’s a play that anyone, any age or gender, can relate to: it’s about family, and ordinary family, working class and middle class characters. And love, how we show it or withhold it; and ambition, what that is in each generation. And it’s both funny and moving, so it’s a play that makes us react – either acting in it or watching it. When I’m writing plays I think about this: I want the audience to laugh and cry and be truly moved, in one evening.The play is not at all autobiographical, none of the four characters is my age. I never write directly from my life, as I think it’s my job to be a human hoover: I listen and watch hundreds of people over time, and slowly absorb what people fear, or hope, or want to solve in their lives. I write a play as a way to explore this, and develop the characters as I write. It was a decade later before I had my daughter, and now she’s at university; and recently I cleared my parent’s house after my Mum died; so now the scenes in the play which show these things make me cry… I think I could only write a play spanning so much when I was at the beginning of my adult life, and observed it all as an outsider. The play details the lives of four women through the immense social changes of the twentieth century. Using a kaleidoscopic time structure, Charlotte Keatley’s story focuses on four generations of one family as they confront the most significant moments of their lives. My Mother Said I Never Should' was written in 1985 and first produced in 1987 when it won both the Royal Court/George Devine Award and the Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for Best New Play. Following its publication in 1988, it has been studied as an A-level set text for a number of years and has subsequently been translated into 22 languages. It holds the distinction of being the most performed play in the English language written by a woman. She studied drama at the University of Manchester and as a postgraduate at the University of Leeds. She has worked as a journalist for Performance magazine, the Yorkshire Post, the Financial Times and the BBC.

You have been a trailblazer for women in theatre over the last 30 years. How do you feel the industry has changed during this time? Since I wrote it, there are still very few plays which show women’s lives as they really are – the day to day, “ordinary” lives, not women being super detectives or political heroines, but the less visible way in which women really can change society: how we raise the next generation, a pretty massive responsibility, but one which is still not seen as a hugely important “job”.Scene 2 is set in 1940, in Chendle Hulme, where Doris is 40, and Margaret is 9. Doris is dusting the piano while singing, and is unaware that her daughter, Margaret is playing with ‘Sukey’- her doll, under it. Doris shows little encouragement and doesn’t participate in any jokes, or activities that Margaret does, and ignores some questions: The story progresses, not in chronological sequence, but through a succession of contrasts: adult with child, mother with daughter, daughter with mother. It suggests that the generations go round in circles, but that there is always the possibility - if you take the optimistic view - of change.