My Mother’s Funeral is a play about grief, but moreso it is a play about class, particularly about the relationships ambitious young people from working class backgrounds have with their families, and with the middle class environments they find themselves in. Abigail is a young playwright whose mother has just died; a working class woman who raised her two children on benefits, her mum did not have any money to leave her, so Abigail is faced with the financial burden of a funeral and the social burden of her feelings of inadequacy around her inability to provide one, and the anxiety around a council funded funeral and the lack of dignity that may hold. She chooses to cave, to make the art that is demanded of her as a working class artist — poverty porn — to hopefully earn the money to pay for her mother’s funeral.
The play weaves between spaces and times in a really clever way, with the 3 actors shifting between characters. With only 3 actors a host of places, times, and characters are shown, and the structure mirrors the overlapping worlds Abigail is facing, as she unsuccessfully attempts to simultaneously sell her personal story, but keep her personal life and the shame she feels about it separated. What really struck me (as an artist from a working class background) was the explorations around love — what does it mean to love your children and express that love when money isn’t an option? One scene in particular was stark in its criticism of both the middle class inability to understand love without finances, and the working class inability to fund love. The friction between these two points of view was present and really thoughtfully articulated through Abigail’s struggle. It is refreshing to see such an honest examination of the working class experience, and in particular the experience of the children of working class parents entering middle class spaces, where despite their intelligence and passion, they will always feel like outsiders.
The staging is simple yet layered, using the play about a play within a play (how meta) to create additional meaning in the spaces and relationships of objects. Simple moments are both hyper real and clearly theatricalised. At times the performances are a bit shouty where they would benefit from nuance, but overall the pacing and staging were very good as were the performances — in particular the physical work of the performers.