My Mother Said I Never Should (Student Editions)

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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’. A: Charlotte Keatley Pf: 1987, Manchester Pb: 1988 G: Drama in 3 acts S: Manchester, Oldham, and London, 1940–87 C: 4f Recently I cut my leg when out running and a kind woman took me to A&E. The doctor there asked me what I do, and what I write, and it turned out that both women had seen this play – one had read it at school 18 years before – and both loved it. That’s beautiful, the best: when a play adds to someone’s understanding of life; much more important than prizes or fame. And once on a snowy night after a production in America, an old man came up to me, took my hands, and said “Thank you, my whole married life matured tonight”. I was speechless. 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. 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.

This non-linear structure, moving around specific times and places, enables us to view the characters at various stages in their lives but also crucially imparts an ironic dimension to their statements. (Each, for instance, vows not to have children). The time device is fundamental to the play’s meaning as well as its psychological themes of guilt, evasions, resentments and eventual revelation of family secrets. Keatley has justified this: ‘I jumble time and childhood because this is not a play about the past, but about how the past continually interrupts the present and informs our present-day decisions’. She called it an Emotional Chronology, which is ‘devised to show how the emotional inheritance of women is handed down’, and also pointed out that other contemporary women dramatists such as Caryl Churchill, Sarah Daniels and Sharman Macdonald have employed similar time devices in their plays (Drama Student Edition, ibid.). Below is a snippet from My Mother Said, this is a really great play and in it’s time it was ground breaking. It’s an all female cast.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? 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. Did you sell lots of your paintings? Did you? You cancelled the opening? I don’t believe you. You’d never do that. The theme is one of independence, childhood, growing up, motherhood, death… And secrets where, as in many families, there is one big elephant in the room which must not be divulged until a certain birthday is reached… And it is the consequences of this secret which forms and drives the relationships between the generations.

London Classic Theatre first produced My Mother Said I Never Should in 2000 to critical acclaim. This revival by one of the UK’s leading touring companies promises to bring the play to life for a new generation.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. How much is My Mother Said I Never Should a personal play? To what extent did you write from your own experience? 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 poignancy of the plot was made even more apparent by the intimacy of Corpus Playroom, the most effective setting to convey the stark conflict between childhood ignorance and the omniscience of hindsight. Director Gabriella Shennan commented on the intentionality behind the staging of the production, explaining how the theatre’s two entrances enabled the play’s non-linearity, while Ioana Dobre’s thoughtful set design served to remind us of the constant intrusion of the past on the present.

In 2000 Charlotte Keatley’s My Mother Said I Never Should (1988) was chosen as one of the 100 Significant Plays of the twentieth century, by the Royal National Theatre. Do you remember how you felt before the very first performance of My Mother Said I Never Should? Can you give us an insight? Find sources: "My Mother Said I Never Should"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( May 2014) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) 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.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. Much as I admire My Mother Said, I wish Rosie’s realisation of her origins came much sooner. One scene, involving the clearance of the parental home in Cheadle Hulme, clearly owes a debt to Chekhov but also goes on far too long. 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.