Peggy Hepburn’s 3-Word Review: Painful. Playful. Meta.
Picture it: your mom has just passed away, you’re broke, there’s no inheritance or insurance, & you’re trying to make funeral arrangements with no credit score to get a loan, no money, & the clock is ticking — & your only potential income is to sell a play to a theatre that continually gives circular demands revolving around buzzwords like “grit”, “raw” & “brave”, leading you to desperately pitch the very situation you are in: a play about a flat-broke Londoner who’s mum has just died.
Such is the plight of Abigail (Nicole Sawyerr) the lead character of My Mother’s Funeral, a tightly choreographed little jewel of a play that’s part of the Encore Fringe Series at Soho Playhouse, & featuring a mere three actors. Abigail never leaves the stage, her comical facial expressions & shaky desperation creating an anchor around which the other actors circle, creating a vulture-like vortex around her. One minute her male foil onstage (Samuel Armfield) is the snobbish theatre director, the next he’s Abigail’s working class brother; the older actress (Debra Baker) plays both her mother & the actress cast to play her mother — there is one head-spinning moment where a scene depicting a memory with Abigail & her mother is suddenly revealed to be a scene that she & the theatre director & the actress portraying her mother are working on. The play becomes a layered labyrinth of fact vs. fiction, implicating the audience in the process (the theatre director continually refers to the wants & needs of “our audience”, & there is more than one meaningful glance out into the seats). We bear witness to our own appetite for “grit” being fulfilled, but this play is like being forced to watch the butcher prepare the meat: the process is messy, & suddenly we’re not so sure we want the meat at all.
I was impressed by the sheer amount of mundane conflicts — Abigail is between a rock & a hard place, & she is at odds with almost every other character in the story, & what she wants is very simple & clear: a dignified funeral for her mother. The play becomes a kind of contemplation of the demands of contemporary society, especially for the working poor, & the perils of mining your own life for art, especially art as it exists in a marketplace. To think, Abigail’s original play was about gay termites in space! Just the right amount of humor offsets the rather devastating material, & the ending is satisfying & beautiful. Brilliant!
—Peggy Hepburn
Directed by Charlotte Bennet. Written by Kelly Jones. Lead image courtesy of Paines Plough. ‘My Mother’s Funeral’ is on at Soho Playhouse in New York January 4-25th, 2025.