“My Mother’s Funeral”

Every year at the Edinburgh Fringe, Paines Plough, a UK touring company specialised in commissioning and developing new writing, brings a cluster of contemporary plays to the Roundabout, located in a courtyard of the Summerhall venue. The playing space of the Roundabout is unusual for Edinburgh, the audience being seated in the round, and exits and entrances of the actors are made from any direction. This means that the action can flow thick and fast, as actors come and go, sometimes switching roles between an exit and an entrance. It proved an ideal space for one of the plays in the Paines Plough programme, Kelly Jones’s My Mother’s Funeral. This three-hander, directed by Charlotte Bennett, is among a number of works on this year’s Fringe, exploring death and grieving (see Sh!t Theatre’s Or What’s Left of us, and Ben Blais’s Dead Mom Play), subjects that lend themselves to an intimate space, where audience members are in close proximity to performers. Kelly Jones’s play opens at a deeply tragic moment for Abigail, a struggling, working-class playwright. Her mother has just died, and to make things worse, the young woman finds herself strapped for cash and unable to pay for the funeral. In conversations with a woman from the Council and her brother, Abigail’s resilience and razor-sharp sense of humour work as a defence mechanism. Even a basic coffin, wreath and reception will cost her four thousand pounds. The alternative, she repeats bitterly, is “a pauper’s funeral” and she is adamant she does not want that for her mother. She finds herself with just forty days to find the money, otherwise the Council will remove her mother’s body from the mortuary and bury it in an unmarked grave. The play, though, is not only about death and the inequalities surrounding it, but it also focuses on class conflict. Abigail receives the bad news that the middle-class director she is working with is pulling out of a commission. Following his advice to let her imagination run wild, she has written a play on gay bugs in space, but now he tells her that this won’t go down well with audiences. They want gritty realism, so she should write about the things she knows best, “through her own unique working-class lens”. Nicole Sawyer, in the role of Abigail, masterfully communicates a spectrum of emotions, from grief and sadness at her mother’s passing, to frustration, irritation and anger at the local council, and a theatre industry that strikes her as unfair and over-demanding. Finding herself with no alternative, if she wants to give her mother a proper funeral, she accepts the new commission to write an autobiographical play. Still, she will do so on her own terms; she will fictionalise it. She decides to write about her late mother. Rehearsals for Abigail’s new play, ‘a play within a play’, get under way and she gets steadily more uptight, standing strong against the director and an actor (Debra Baker). Baker moves seamlessly between several roles: the real-life mother, the fictionalised mother, the woman from the Council, the middle-class actor playing the mother, who arrogantly voices her concerns about the script. Samuel Armfield in the roles of the cynical, unfeeling middle-class director and Abigail’s brother, who had a terrible relationship with his mother, brings to life two strikingly different characters, one articulate and successful in his field, the other working-class and struggling to express his feelings. While My Mother’s Funeral is deftly crafted and the acting is first-class, I could not help feeling that there would be scope in the future for a full-length play, given the complex themes, rather than the fifty to sixty minute fringe format.