Written by Kelly Jones

Review by Jack Quinn

ROUNDABOUT @ Summerhall: Tickets

Brimming with emotion and meta-theatrical wit, My Mother’s Funeral is a pressing reflection on the extortionate costs of theatre-making and funeral-arranging.

The narrative centres around Abigail Waller, freelance theatremaker and writer, whose mother has just passed away. The play opens with an all too familiar interaction between a programmer and Abigail in which the funding for her new play, Astro-mite, has been withdrawn because of its hyperreal setting and themes, demanding that they wanted ‘gritty’, ‘urgent’ and ‘raw’ material such as her previous work, Rage, Dagenham. Having lost this funding, Abigail now faces the very ‘real’ concern of organising and paying for her mother’s funeral without any savings or life insurance left behind from her mother.

Refusing to commit her mother to a council burial in favour of a more ‘dignified’ farewell, Abigail sets out to write a play about her mother’s funeral to fund the actual burial of her mother. Fuelling this brash decision is the constant demands of the hospital for Abigail to claim her mother’s body, which would mean she would be financially responsible for the body.

Kelly Jones’ play is an intelligent, engaging and pertinent evocation of the ethics of theatremaking from biographical trauma, the appetite of programming theatres for the fetishisation of working-class narrative tropes, and a provocation of taking time to heal and process grief and trauma, making art from these events when the time is right, not just for financial gain.

A meta-theatrical examination of how and why work is programmed, My Mother’s Funeral is a searing success and a bold programming choice from Paines Plough.

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