The cost-of-living crisis fills inches of newspaper columns but where is the discussion about the cost of dying? Last year, according to the insurer SunLife, the average cost of a basic funeral hit an all-time high of over £4,000. Kelly Jones’s thoughtful new play My Mother’s Funeral: The Show is a tender and timely exploration of this devastating socio-economic reality.
At its centre is Abigail Waller (Nicole Sawyerr), a tyro working-class playwright whose mother has just died. She wants to give her much-beloved mum the funeral of her dreams, not the pauper’s grave offered by the council. But she’s strapped for cash. After all, the Dagenham chippy she works at doesn’t pay well, and her local theatre – a spoofy Royal Court – has just rejected her latest play, Astro-mite, for failing to pander to white guilt or fashionable identity politics. So, to afford funeral fineries, Abigail turns fact into theatre, the tragic story of her mother’s death into the titular show.
Kelly Jones’s writing excels at probing the ethics of turning painful personal memory into profitable public art. She asks us to consider what dignity in death really looks like and the high price at which it might come. Is a beautiful funeral, replete with white doves and all the cards in Clintons, worth it if middle-class actors and directors reduce cherished mother-daughter moments to offensive working-class caricature? These weighty insights frequently strain against the play’s light tone and jocularity, which fall prey to the classist stereotypes the production sets out to satirise. Abigail’s brother, Darren, speaks in thuggish threats (‘I don’t need an excuse to deck a posh cunt’) and her mother’s favourite colour is leopard print.
Tonal uneasiness also causes problems for the actors. Exuberant satire dominates, and the result is that Abigail’s grief never lands as it should. Nicole Sawyerr expresses mental anguish through bodily shakes and trembling lips, which need to be more subtly realised. Similarly, Samuel Armfield’s Darren is played with an almost parodic chavviness; yet in the role of the smarmy artistic director, he finds his feet and scintillates with irony. It is really Debra Baker’s show. She plays a roll call of parts – Abigail’s mother, a poncy actress, a hospital administrator, and others – all memorable due to her masterful vocal intonations.
Rhys Jarman’s set design stays true to the meta-theatrical themes of the production. The Yard is scarcely transformed; it’s an East London theatre playing itself. Props from other shows are in view, and a hexagonal platform with a mic is centre stage. It’s all set up for a comic stand-up show; that is, until it is transformed into a flower-strewn grave, making the point that the ceremonies of death are a kind of grisly theatre. And Jones certainly enjoys eliding the distinctions between director and funeral director.
My Mother’s Funeral: The Show is not to be missed by anyone deeply concerned with how theatre can speak potently to the social and economic realities of a pocket-pinched Britain with intelligence and spirited wit. There’s a really good show here. But, as Abigail herself concludes, sometimes the cruel realities of grief get buried behind all the theatrics.
Drama
By Kelly Jones
Director: Charlotte Bennett
Photo credits: Nicola Young
Cast includes: Nicole Sawyerr; Debra Baker; Samuel Armfield.
Until: Saturday 21st September 2024
Running Time: 1 hour and 10 minutes with no interval.