The Stage

My Mother Said I Never Should

Published Monday 8 February 2010 at 11:05 by Robin Duke

Twenty-five years after Charlotte Keatley found it almost impossible for anyone prepared to stage her all-female drama about the “ordinary” lives of four generations of women, this still stands as one of the most finely crafted works in recent British drama.

Perhaps the problem was the non-linear, non-chronological storyline, or perhaps it was the fact that the nearest any male member of the proceedings gets is sitting unseen offstage in a car or kitchen.

Thanks then to Brigid Larmour at Manchester’s Contact Theatre in 1987 for starting its ball rolling and thanks now to Amy Leach for an inspired revival which takes full advantage of those elements which were once so scorned.

From air raids to art school, birth pills to post-punk, through myths and motherhood, the four generations share and pass on wisdom in what becomes a full circle of life and death.

As the quartet of women, Lorna Beckett (as Jackie - a teenager by the late sixties), Josie Daxter (Rosie - reaching her teens as Margaret Thatcher was elected for her third term as prime minister), Anne Kavanagh (Doris - the grande dame of the dynasty who sacrificed the most to be a “housewife”) and Christine Mackie (Margaret - determined to “have it all” in post-war Britain) all criss-cross from innocence to experience in a timescale which sees women emerge from the wreckage of the last world war to the uncertainties of the present day - each generation in turn teaching and learning from the next.

It’s still so powerful, poignant and unmissable.