Performance: Mum's the Word

Bruce Mason Theatre

Review: Susan Budd


Gales of laughter from a predominantly female audience greeted tales of the trials and tribulations of child-rearing in Mum's the Word.

It was the laughter of recognition of shared experience and, for older women at least, relief that it is all over. And poignant moments drew sighs of sympathy from the sisterhood.

The performance is a collection of monologues, with the cast of six rising from their child-size chairs in front of a long line of washing to tell the audience of their experiences.

There is little interaction and, virtually, no plot. The play is reminiscent of consciousness-raising groups in which each member rises to share her story.

Their stories are told, however, with bravura and wit. Old wives' tales of the horrors of pregnancy and birth are succeeded by war stories of coping with nappies and exhaustion, of toddlers' near-death experiences and workaholic husbands' insensitivity to the demands of motherhood.

The long time spent in hospital by a premature baby is told in serious counterpoint to the hilarious scenes of near-disasters and rough comedy.

Each woman is vividly drawn. Angela Ayers is an erstwhile urban sophisticate occasionally crushed by the appalling mess of her new life; Vivien Bell conveys the pathos of the mother of a hospitalised child and the comic palsy of a woman desperately trying to rock her baby to sleep.

Emma Kinane raises the biggest laugh of the night when she sprays bystanders with breast milk, closely followed by Mairanga White's double streak across the stage in pursuit of a straying child.

Bronwyn Bradley's increasingly frustrated letters to a partner who inhabits a separate, corporate world form a beautifully orchestrated crescendo.

Denise O'Connell, as the woman who starts as Mary Poppins and ends as Cruella De Vile, may not have the best lines but sounds as though she does.

Her comic timing is superb in pithy accounts of the sheer hell and joy of bringing up children.

Ellie Smith's production fleshes out the monologues with vaudeville scenes of high comedy.