Mother? – ARC, Stockton-on-Tees

Writer: Rachel Stockdale

Director: Tracy Gillman

“It’s the most natural thing and we’re making it clinical and scary,” says Rachel Stockdale towards the end of her latest one-woman show, Mother?

It comes after her hour-long monologue, supported by extracts from the extensive interviews taken while writing it, delves deep into contemporary motherhood. What is a mother? Who is a mother? Should I be a mother?

Before the show starts, there’s time to look over the details of the set. A playroom – including a giant ted, plush toys aplenty, a let’s pretend kitchen and a ball pool – is a starter kit for perfect parenting. But it’s far too tidy, something that is quickly put right when Stockdale emerges, transforming ball pool into birthing pool. Brightly coloured plastic all over the stage, and the whole magnificently, messy mothering journey is underway.

The show is based on interviews with more than 100 mams and nannas (biological and adoptive), carers, healthcare professionals and others involved with bringing up baby. There’s even room for a comment from a dad – long enough to acknowledge his existence, brief enough to escape any whiff of mansplaining.

Some are heard verbatim, from recordings of Stockdale’s fieldwork. The show starts with mams talking about their post-birth sex lives; blunt Teesside tones elicit knowing laughter with “people say they’re doing it once a week – are you f*ckin’ kiddin’?”

That’s typical of the script: rooted, unpretentious and straight to the point. The tone can be celebratory: “My body is f*cking amazing,” says one mam, who discovers a refreshing new attitude to body image after carrying and birthday her child.

At other times it’s unsettling, verging on harrowing. The plush toys are turned away from the audience, a warning of darker times ahead. A solemn recitation of the medical regime around IVF treatment was an eye-opener for a family that – mercifully – never had to go through it. Accounts of debilitating morning sickness and maternity ward intimidation amplify an on-going sense that nobody is actually listening, pointing at underlying problems in the system. Clinical and scary. Unnatural.

Mother? lands emotional punches. Where Stockdale reveals snatches of her own abusive childhood, returning to the personal confessional style of her 2024 hit Fat Chance, the tone shifts, becomes starkly emotional. The foster mum recognising that “Love is not enough when a child has experienced serious trauma” when eight years of struggle end with the girl, now 16, returned to residential care is painful to hear.

At its best, Mother? unpicks some of the taboos around parenting. Amid the humour, there’s some hard talk – and not all of it palatable. From the role of racism in child removals to unheard pleas to place vulnerable children in care, these are stark reminders of a forbidden truth: not all parents are “good”, not all families are functional, not everyone gets a happy ever after.

There were some bits of the premiere that felt uneven. At times the show seems undecided whether it’s going to be drama or documentary and risks falling between two stools. Your reviewer’s wife suggested that there has been extensive research and writing about motherhood, and questioned how much of the show represented new ideas, however engagingly presented.

But the opening night, attended by several of the women whose voices made it into the script and accompanied by an exhibition of 30 portraits of those women by socially-inclusive photographer Debbie Todd, went down well with its audience.

Runs until 19th June 2026.

Also at Live Theatre, Newcastle on 30th June 2026.