I wrote the first draft of MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD in 1985, when I was twenty-five... and spent about three years re-writing it. The play was premiered in Manchester and its success was followed up by a run at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
I wrote it because I didn’t know of any plays about mothers and daughters, although we have hundreds of years worth of plays about fathers and sons, or sons and mothers. Yet it seems to me that a woman's relationship with her mother, that strange bond of love and jealousy, has a lifelong and unavoidable influence.
I set this play across this century because we have witnessed such enormous changes in opportunities for women between each generation - although many of the desires and stresses for women remain unchanged. I have jumbled chronology because this is not a play about memory. but about the emotional inheritance which impinges on our daily decisions. Likewise the child remains inside the women, often shouting at what the adult refuses to hear. Therefore the child scenes should not be nostalgic or coy, these girls are serious and out of the public eye, they are not “good”.
I wanted to acknowledge the debt that my generation owes to past generations of women; “feminism” is too often presented as a preoccupation of university educated women in their twenties or thirties. I learned my “feminism” in Manchester, from the kind of women who invest their energy, often their whole lives, in other people, The behaviour of mothers shapes a nation as much as governments or wars do, so I would call this play “political” and I wrote it for mainstage spaces.
Thave drawn strength from feeling myself to be part of a wave of women playwrights emerging in different countries during the 1980s. It is exciting as well as daunting to use theatre to tell new and old stories from a female viewpoint, and to find the demand for these plays is worldwide. MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD has now been performed across Europe, in America and is scheduled for Japan and Australia in 1991. I am delighted that Actors Theatre Circle have chosen it to be one of the Substation’s first productions and I hope this is the first of many successful seasons for them both.
– Charlotte Keatley
