My Mother’s Funeral: The Show
This review is from the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe.
This smart satire from Kelly Jones follows Abigail (Nicole Sawyerr), a struggling young working class playwright whose mum has just died. The cost of the funeral her mum wanted is £4,000 - which Abigail can in no way afford, not least because the Royal Court-coded theatre she was under commission for to write a play about gay termites in space (!) has decided to back out. But the theatre’s smarmy artistic director suggests they might be more receptive if she can come up with something closer to her ‘authentic’ debut play.
My Mother’s Funeral isn’t so much about funerals as it is working class dignity. On the one hand, Abigail has an easy way out of her bind: allow the council to handle things. But she won’t, because she sees it as a ‘pauper’s funeral’ and because she loved her mum and they had a discussion once about what type of funeral she’d like and Abigail wants to honour that.
On the other hand, there’s a ludicrously complicated way out: the theatre isn’t interested in her original ideas but is extremely excited about the prospect of her stripmining her roots for more material. In a desperate effort to extract some money out of them to pay for the funeral, she proposes to belittle herself by writing a play… about her mum’s (hypothetical) funeral, attempting to bounce the theatre into commissioning it before her 14 days to release the body from the morgue are up.
The fundamentals of Jones’s play are very strong, as is...