MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL

The Yard Theatre

★★★★★

“fresh and funny and angry”

Abigail’s mother has died and she can’t afford the funeral. This simple fact drives a play that spirals in different directions, examining class inequality, the consequences of revealing your trauma for art commissions, the different sides of a parent that children can experience. All of this is considered through a warm and darkly comic lens.

Abigail (Nicole Sawyerr) is a writer and as the middle-class theatre commissioner keeps reminding her, she is a writer who grew up on a council estate. As her brother keeps reminding her, she is the only one from ‘around here’ who goes to this theatre. The disconnect between audience and experience is stark. Realising that the only way she can afford a funeral is to get a commission (the theatre didn’t like her piece about gay bugs in space, they want something through her ‘unique lens’) Abigail finds herself writing a play about a woman who can’t afford her mother’s funeral. But as the theatre people workshop her experiences into caricature and the money seems ever elusive, Abigail must wrestle with the ethics of what she is doing, while also grieving her mother.

The themes are complicated and hard-hitting. There are so many moments in this play where you want a chance to stop and think, to consider the point that’s just been made. But that’s not allowed, the pace is careening, a whirlwind of grief and exploitation that mirrors the chaotic aftermath of a death.

Kelly Jones’ script is layered, complex and slippery. The jokes are packed in, managing to have us laughing through gritted teeth at the out of touch theatre people, and laughing with moist eyes at some of the softer, quieter moments. It’s an angry script, and rightly so. Many people won’t know how expensive funerals have become (the costs have risen 126% in the last 20 years) and might not know about what happens if you can’t afford it. This is a story that’s worth telling, but by adding the complexity of Abigail wrestling with telling it, Jones elevates this piece to a broader critique of class and the arts and the cluelessness of those in power.

Charlotte Bennett’s direction is energetic and slick. The three performers dart about the stage, their tangled emotions explored in masterful light and shade. Sawyerr as Abigail quivers with tension, trapped in an impossible situation. Samuel Armfield is maddening as the theatre commissioner, and extremely moving as Abigail’s brother Darren, whose memories of their mother are more complicated and his grief harder to grapple with. Debra Baker plays both Linda the mother and the Actor who will perform as the mother in the play Abigail is writing. This is a stroke of genius to twist the knife of Abigail’s pain. Baker slips effortlessly between the two, as well as doing a hilarious turn as a set builder, throwing mud everywhere for the ‘authentic working-class experience’.

Rhys Jarman’s set begins simply, with a small two-levelled stage at the centre. As the play within a play develops, the set design becomes more involved and a grave is revealed. There is something sickeningly powerful about an on-stage grave. It’s a brilliant choice.

This play is fresh and funny and angry. It deservedly won a Scotsman Fringe First Award for new writing at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe. In combining the universal and the specific it’s found a powerful niche. It’s just shy of harrowing, but it’s certainly worth your time.

MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL

The Yard Theatre

Reviewed on 30th January 2025

by Auriol Reddaway

Photography by Nicola Young

Previously reviewed at this venue:

PERKY NATIVITITTIES | ★★★★ | December 2024

THE FLEA | ★★★★★ | October 2024

THE FLEA | ★★★★ | October 2023

MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL

MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL

MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL