A funny and moving portrayal of the trials of womanhood, motherhood, and everything in between

Broken Water is written and produced by Michèle Winstanley, and directed by Nicola Samer. Running at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston until the 24th February, this account of the lives of three very different women living on the same street in London, has been shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award, BBC Writer’s Room, and the Nick Darke Award. This, alongside a cast of Rosemary Ashe, Sarah Hadland (of BBC’s Miranda) and Naomi Petersen, made for a palpable buzz of anticipation on press night.

The set is simple and effective: three wooden chairs, for the three women, which are rearranged over the course of the production, to represent various different settings. The play centres on the three women’s relationship to their femininity and their bodies, and their experiences of fertility, pregnancy, birth and motherhood. The writing is excellent – their stories diverge in almost every sense, and yet the audience comes away with a sense of the various parallels in their experiences, and the connections they forge with each other – in spite of their vastly differing ages, pasts, and futures.

In this respect, you could argue the play is accessible to a wide audience – not just for the young, the old or the middle-aged. But its representation of the struggles of having children, or trying to have them, is centred on cis-hetero women, and as a result may lack connection for a queer audience, and indeed may struggle to convert the hordes of cis-hetero men into paying attention to the experiences of women. 

But the play is funny, affectionate and warm, striking a good balance between scenes of suffering and heartbreak, and those of laughter and joy. It’s eminently watchable, if at times gritty. The cast are excellent, the characters convincingly portrayed, and Sarah Hadland and Naomi Petersen in particular deserve a mention for their versatility.

I particularly liked the way Winstanley highlights the ways in which motherhood can make you invisible – in one particularly funny scene Philippa (Hadland) talks about catcalling men while she’s pushing a pram, and the shock and horror in their response. There’s an important point here – Winstanley shows us the ways that women are made to not count (they’re endless really) if they do have children, and the ways that they can be excluded or stigmatised when they don’t. As ever, as a woman, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Despite the perhaps slightly narrow nature of this production’s content, it does what it says on the tin very, very well. If that alone doesn’t convince you to go and see it, several very familiar faces from British television dotted around the audience suggest this is definitely one to watch, and the standing ovation at the end was indeed well-deserved.