WRITER
LIFE is FUNNY.
The way I see it, everyone is at odds with everyone else in this world. As individuals, we can only ever see things through the eyes that we have. We might find that we look at the world in a similar way to the people that populate our lives most of the time, but there’s always going to be some stuff you just can’t fathom why they think that. That’s at the root of all drama. We’re surrounded by this conflict, immersed in it, and it drives everything that is interesting in the world. That’s why I love drama.
My film script ‘The Shadow of Ingestre Hall’ was nominated for ‘Best Drama’ at The Royal Television Society Awards. My comedy play ‘In the Motherhood’ sold out at The Birmingham REP and then enjoyed a national tour. My sitcom was filmed before a live studio audience at St. David’s Hall in Cardiff. My non-fiction publication for Channel Four books is still in print ten years after publication. I’m an accomplished, efficient, funny, and ambitious writer and I’d love to collaborate with you if you have a story to tell. I’m always writing up the stories that surround me. I’m currently working on a new short film, a series of short books for new mothers and a box set of tales for Key Stage 1 readers.
Read reviews of In the Motherhood….
The universality of perfect motherhood as a primal, nurturing absolute is frothily deconstructed in this wry, aridly dry, newly-penned observational satire by playwright Hayley Pepler. But is something much more sinister being nurtured here? Might the overbearing chic Bonnie (Sarah Horner) bottle-blonde and alabaster, the chalk to Nita’s (Louise Mardenborough) nits and fleas, be the Home Counties version of The Stepford Wives?
Pepler’s vivacious comedy of recognition/tragedy of neglect draws us into her microcosm of aspirational village PTA committee femme-banal – or so our salt and pepper manipulative antagonists delude themselves not to be. Mission driven fund-raisers, our archetypal competitive mothers dispense conditional altruism according to a strict pecking order. All seems perfectly prim and proper in the best of all possible worlds for the politically correct Bonnie and Nita. That is until outsider Jacs (Lauren Crace) arrives to muddy their sommelier-crafted Aqua Deco designer waters of smugness. Time for the Masonic Motherhood to circle the wagons – but has their Calvary arrived in the character of Jacs? She is keen to join the PTA but Bonnie and Nita’s criteria for election are as demanding as they are esoteric. Thus unfolds an effervescent fifty-five minutes of manipulations and tantrums that stamp across the angst-strewn minefield of impossible motherhood expectations. Call it a mothers’ coming of rage, a rally cry to fellow sisters to shake off the shackles of judgmental servitude and surrender of identity. Don’t corral us in the collective noun of Mums! We have our own names.
Pepler wisely eschews the predictable clichéd kitchen knife-to-grind message. The denouement reveal that climaxes in the giddily hilarious mock interview/interrogation to assess Jacs’ suitability to join the PTA committee is crisply, even creepily satisfying. However, this bittersweet, but at times perhaps rather too comfortably reassuring, focused slice of contemporary life suggests moments of near twee self-congratulation. Contemporaneous in as much as a white, middle-class covertly selective village primary school can be. Fast paced, convincingly portrayed, together with director Tom Saunders’ use of nursery rhyme/playground chimed school-term transitions that frame the narrative with precision and energy, this is an engaging, pertinent and thoroughly entertaining production. Radios 4/X commissioning editors take note.
John Kennedy, The Reviews Hub
