Writers: Joanna Norland and Ellie Ward
Director: Ellie Ward
There are many differing ways in which motherhood exists, especially in the arts and literature. Many of those are captured in Yellow Things, a double bill of plays about motherhood. In Mothers Have Nine Lives, Joanna Norland’s 1992 series of nine monologues. Mira Morrison, Becky Lumb and Ellie Ward (who also directs) take turns to portray some very different versions of motherhood.
And so we meet Louise, whose story from pregnancy test to motherhood is delivered by Morrison as a series of questions being asked of her by her boyfriend (later her fiancé and then husband), her mother, her healthcare team, but none of them asking her opinion, later reappearing as, among others, a workaholic mum who drifts back into her old job by offloading her child to her own mother. Ward is Gina, a single mum on benefits who just wants a double buggy to make her life more bearable for her and her daughters (18 months and 2 months), but who instead faces a wall of Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
Lumb’s strongest of her three monologues is as Kim, a frazzled mother struggling to get her two young girls through breakfast and ready for school. Mercurial food tastes, surprise announcements of baked goods requirements and one girl’s unerring ability to spill things on herself produce an admirably vivid impression of a slapstick scene where the two main culprits remain invisible.
Norland’s monologues are separated by audio of three kids of primary school age (played by the cast) whose playground games involve someone “being the mummy”. The technique doesn’t quite work in the Bridge House’s staging, partially due to some pairing up with lighting cues that distract when the timings get out of sync. It does emphasise that the pressure society puts on young women to be the “right sort” of mother starts at a very early age, a theme that Norland expands upon through her monologues.
That also carries through to the second play of the evening, Ward’s original adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 feminist horror The Yellow Wallpaper. Lumb plays a lesbian who, after finally achieving a successful round of IVF, splits from her girlfriend, who then dies of cancer before the birth. Such tragedy is then compounded by acute postpartum depression.
Recuperating at a mysterious country house, Lumb’s character becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room, convinced that the pattern is moving, and possibly hiding a spectral figure within. The gradual unravelling of the woman’s mind is, Ward’s adaptation suggests, at least in part due to the dismissive nature of her doctor. Referring to her only as “Mummy” and her depression as “baby blues”, the belittling way in which her agony is dismissed combines with the implicit assertion that motherhood should be a natural process, and any struggles she has should make her feel guilty for letting down her baby.
The story is sufficiently well structured that it really does not need the attempt at jump scares that an onstage version of the woman in the wall is intended to evoke. The horrors Lumb’s woman faces are all too well relayed through the writing and acting.
Far better is the reintroduction of the young children’s voices from Norland’s play. That decision ties the two works closely together, uniting different works with a common theme into an effective full-length evening that highlights the difficulties, traumas, and occasional joys of motherhood.
Continues until 26 April 2025
