She Called Me Mother

She Called Me Mother by Michelle Inniss

Upstairs @ The Western, 17^th October 2015

“confronts very uncomfortable issues but mixes them with humour”

A 70 year old Jamaican woman sits on a borrowed stool under the arches of London Bridge selling the Big Issue. She’s not a beggar. She has a job. And a home. Well, a dingy room in the basement of a derelict house. But it is her dingy room.

She sits all day selling the magazines for £2.50 a time. Earning that £2.50 a time gives her back a little of her dignity. One of her regular customers, a young woman about the same age as her estranged daughter, gets her thinking of  how she became alienated from her one and only daughter and how she waits in vain for her to come and find her.

As is always the way, there are two sides to every story and Evangeline, as the mother, sees things very differently from Shirley. As the true story unfolds, side by side, we see how the daughter, for all her determination to avoid the mistakes her mother made, treads the same path and Evangeline is forced to face up to the horrors she has buried deep in her head.

The parallel stories converge when Shirley finally decides to try and make her peace with the mother she felt betrayed and abandoned her at 16. This is a multi layered story brought to life by two very accomplished actresses.

Cathy Tyson is a familiar face to both TV and cinema audiences from her BAFTA and Golden Globe nominated roles in Mona Lisa (with Bob Hoskins) and ITV’s Band of Gold and BBC’s Grange Hill and is especially effective in this powerhouse role written in Trinidadian Vernacula which highlights the loneliness of the immigrant uprooted and then left unsupported.

Chereen Buckley, as daughter Shirley, powerhouses her way through the emotions of being an abused daughter and wife and ably holds her own alongside the monumental talent that is Cathy Tyson.

Ms Tyson is co-founder of Pitch Lake Productions and this play is part of Black Theatre Live.

This is a play that confronts very uncomfortable issues but mixes them with humour and pathos.

She Called Me Mother is touring until at least spring 2016 http://www.pitchlakeproductions.com/tour-dates.html

 Upstairs at The Western http://upstairsatthewestern.com/

First published in Western Gazette

and Pub Theatre Reviews