What I’d Be starts with two girls sitting on a park bench, aged 15 and 18. Things are not right at home: they joke about having to hide university admission papers in case mum sees them. They do not realise that this is the last time they will see each other until they are grown up, by then they will have taken very different paths.
We next see them many years later after their mother’s funeral, which Makayla has pointedly refused to attend. Makayla, played by Rachel Jones, is the sister who got away, completed her university degree, got a good job, has her own flat, is engaged to be married. She has changed her name, become vegetarian, got vaccinated…
Her sister Ally, played by Beth Birss, is the put-upon daughter who stayed at home with the sociopathic mother who tells her she was ‘a terrible daughter and a worse sister.’ She talks of no significant relationships except with her mother, she works in a bookshop.
The sisters are well into the self-understanding that everything their mother did was wrong – she was selfish and narcissistic – but they are still struggling with the effect this has had on them. They are wrestling with the pain and guilt of having grown up in mum’s orbit.
It feels as if all Makayla’s success is somehow at the cost of sister, and their estrangement over the intervening years has not helped. The play is a funny, poignant conversation between siblings about the cost of having a psychologically abusive parent. ‘Was it written somewhere that we got the mum that didn’t care?’ Ally asks.
As they work through their relationship it becomes clear how little choice they had. What is left is their shared sense of sisterhood in all its cruelty and comedy.
This is an angry and tender play, well presented by the two actors with an amusing script which keeps the action going, such as it is, but it lacks the theatrical panache to take it to the next level.
Playwright: Tanieth Kerr
Director: Kate Livsey
Cast: Rachel Jones, Beth Birss
Duration: 60 minutes no interval
Until: 21 February 2026