Writer: Kirsty Smith
Director: Lucy Speed
This is a tiny jewel of a play. 60 or so minutes of relentless, sweary, honest impressions of motherhood, told with devastating power by Michelle Luther.
Alice is a ‘senile prima gravida’, coming up on 40 when she’s bringing her first pregnancy to term, and consequently subjected to all kinds of tests, both medical and spiritual. There is a lot of very funny, brutally frank description of the indignities and discomforts of the process of pregnancy, a lot of musing on the moral qualities that make a ‘good mother’, all of it conveyed with a foul-mouthed energy that has the audience at the King’s Head squirming in their seats and reviewing their life choices. And it is, all that not withstanding, very, very funny. As a prologue to the stories of pregnancy and child-birth, she details the physical and mental pain of multiple miscarriages, and it is agonising.
Kirsty Smith has adapted her own book into an extremely effective piece of theatre, Lucy Speed has directed with energy and grace, but the lionesses share of the praise goes to Michelle Luther. She navigates a torrent of emotions: lacerating despair and self-hatred as she blames herself for losing pregnancies, mountainous joy when she holds her child, and weary, weary recriminations and regrets after a month or two of no sleep. If theatre is about letting the audience go for a walk in someone else’s shoes, Michelle Luther takes it on a ten mile hike in Alice’s comfy gym-daps.
The King’s Head is a tiny venue, and the audience’s closeness to the stage and the actor makes it almost complicit in Alice’s suffering. Michelle Luther is unsparing in driving that complicity home, unstinting in her portrayal of hard experiences and overwhelming emotional highs and lows, relentlessly foul-mouthed, and also, as previously mentioned, very funny indeed.
Runs until 9 October 2022
