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I was back at the Soho Theatre in mid-January this year, watching Now That's What We Call Musicals performed by Le Gateau Chocolat and Johnny Woo. It felt wonderful to be out again at the theatre, after the Christmas fears of another lockdown, and particularly at the Soho Theatre where both the shows (plays, cabaret, comedy) and the audience demonstrate a lively diversity.
Mum, which I saw two months earlier, could not have been more different in tone from January's camp cabaret. Mum’s theme is early motherhood, focusing on the fears, loneliness, and sense of inadequacy that can overwhelm mothers in the first months of their babies’ lives, starting with the extraordinarily physical act of birth:
Like a great flood. Like precious metals and rust and everything in between … fear so strong I could hold it.
The physical set echoes the play's emotional tone. The stage is bare apart from a jumble of baby clothes and a giant perspex cloud mobile. Nina, the central character, is played by Sophie Melville, gaunt and jagged in pale grey joggers, with her hair pulled back into what looks like a painfully tight ponytail.
Mum is written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, the author of Emilia, an award-winning comedy about a seventeenth century feminist poet. Mum has some moments of comedy too, particularly in the depiction of Pearl, Nina's mother-in-law, who is certain that motherhood is “natural” and easy but manages to infantilise her son and be competitive with, rather than supportive of, Nina.
The play opens with Nina getting ready for her first night off from mothering, leaving her twelve-week-old son, Ben, in the care of her husband and Pearl. There is some comic irony as we watch Nina spend her first night “off” obsessively talking to her friend about her baby. She speaks about the enormous love she has for Ben but also her overwhelming tiredness, her bewildering sense of resentment, and her occasional thoughts of harming her son.
Winnicott writes about maternal ambivalence and the eigh