Yellow Things
Bridge House Theatre
Star rating: 3.5
This show is a double bill featuring three actors. The first half gives us Mothers Have Nine Lives by Joanna Norland and after the interval comes an adapted version of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Overall we meet ten monologue-ing mothers. It’s richly truthful material and anyone who has ever been a mother will recognise and identify with parts of it which is why, in places, it’s funny.
First we meet Mira Morrison as a professionally high flying, middle-class pregnant woman trying to field all the questions and advice thrown at her by everyone in her life. Then, in another persona, Morrison becomes a woman we’ve all met who is so obsessed with work that she gradually subs her child out almost full-time to grandparents.
Then there’s Gina (Ellie Ward who also directs) as a desperate single mother with two very young daughters, on benefits, in desperate need of a double buggy and thwarted every way she turns.
All three actors are good, with notably skilled voice work to distinguish their many characters, but the real star of this show is Becky Lumb: wonderful as a fraught mother supervising breakfast for her daughters who have her wrapped round their little fingers. She also gives a lovely performance as a mother who desperately wants to spend Christmas with her daughter home from university but is, of course, disappointed. Joanna Norland’s play simply, and rather effectively, simply presents nine of these snapshots as a rounded exploration of motherhood.
The Yellow Wallpaper is darker and deeper. Becky Lumb presents a gay woman who bears a child but whose partner (who contributes the egg for IVF) separates from her and then dies of cancer before the child is even born. The thirty minute play alternates between her talking rationally to her baby and being sectioned with severe post-natal depression in an institution where she is completely spooked by the faded yellow wallpaper. It’s a sterling performance: moving, powerful and insightful. And the video projection of the wallpaper and the sinister things which seem to her to be emanating from it is nicely done.
Between monologues we hear the voices of children playing mothers and babies – sound designed by Ellie Ward – which adds another dimension because it makes us think about the impressions of motherhood we form long before we get there.
Yellow Things is competent, thoughtful theatre.
