Bites off more than it can chew, but at least it has good taste.
There is a lot that Our Mothers’ Daughters wants to say and therein lies both its appeal and its central problem. Sarah Tara Ray’s debut play arrives at Playhouse East with its arms full: abortion rights, queer desire, bi erasure, the slow erosion of a woman’s selfhood into wifehood and motherhood, endometriosis, sexual violence and the particular psychic weight carried by young women navigating a world that seems to be sliding backwards. To its credit, the piece is genuinely concerned with all of it, though concern and craft are not the same thing.
The play follows a loose constellation of women in their twenties: Billy (Ray), her best friend Kat (Hannah Redfern), newly engaged and laser-focused on it; the Artist (LJ Williams), whose burgeoning relationship with Sophie (Andi Bickers) is complicated by an unwanted pregnancy; Emma (Ellen Pallent), the Artist’s younger sister, buttoned-up and anxious in a way her sibling, all jorts and bandana, emphatically is not; and a mother (Jessica Radcliffe), who arrives in the second half as a kind of reckoning with roads not taken.
The staging is deliberately, almost defiantly, minimal: a couch at the centre of the space, a small table, a retro radio that hums in the background of domestic life without ever quite being acknowledged as the aesthetic choice it obviously is. Characters enter and exit through a front door stage right or disappear stage left into bathrooms and other rooms, the geography of a shared flat rendered through suggestion. It is an approach that suits the material as this is a play about interiority, about what women say to each other in the spaces men are not. Director Hannah Berrigan handles the spatial constraints with enough confidence that the limitations rarely feel like limitations at all. Between scenes, popular songs punctuate the action, a playlist that leans into something recognisably and which gives the production a lightness that the script itself sometimes struggles to sustain.
The ensemble is, for the most part, well-drawn in outline and well-served by a cast that handles the comic timing with considerable skill. Williams in particular locates a real interiority in the Artist’s more quietly devastating moments, and Pallent brings a nervy touch to Emma that makes her one of the more interesting figures on stage. Billy’s comic set pieces land with the audience, and Ray has an instinct for when to cut a scene before it tips over into something more uncomfortable than the play is prepared to be.
But that instinct is less consistent at the level of the writing itself. The script moves through its themes like a checklist rather than a drama, raising an issue, having a character articulate a position on it, and moving on before anything has been allowed to breathe or complicate itself. The result is something that occasionally feels less like theatre and more like a very well-performed panel discussion, one in which the questions are always set up in order to be answered rather than to sit with the audience and do the murkier work that theatre is uniquely equipped for. At two hours with interval, it also outstays its welcome; there is a tighter, more searching play inside this one, and it keeps almost surfacing.
Our Mothers’ Daughters has warmth, humour, and an investment in its characters; it simply needs to trust that investment more, and let feeling do the work that argument has been doing too much of.
Our Mothers’ Daughters’ run at Playhouse East, London, for the Work In Progress Festival has now concluded, but it will be performed at Riverside Studios 8th-9th August – Tickets here.