FringeReview UK 2018

My Mum’s a Twat

Royal Court Theatre

Genre: Comedic, Contemporary, New Writing, Short Plays, Solo Performance, Theatre

Venue: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

‘Have you ever tried to sustain a relationship with a twat?’ Some debuts establish more than a new voice. Anoushka Warden’s My Mum’s a Twat certainly revels in its compelling and sassy distinctiveness; but it nails to this a cause. There’s a kernel of pain Warden wraps round with a coming-of-age comedy, and inside that a cold fury. The loss of her mother and parts of her childhood to a cult impel this larky dance-off from ten to eighteen. ‘An unreliable version of a true story’ it might be but the strangest parts are the truest.

We’re thoroughly immersed in a teen envelope: the Royal Court’s Upstairs boasts powder-blue walls, beanbags for the front row and trolls and other teen shelves in Chloe Lamford’s edgily cute set lit by Steven Binks, where Duramaney Kamara’s music and sound mug the walls in boom-bites. Directed by Vicky Featherstone and Jude Christian, it’s a blast against something very different, where the blue turns on the fragile eggshell of identity.

Not that Warden herself, let alone her superb avatar Patsy Ferran exhibit vulnerability, except at given moments in the narrative where the mercurial, deeply affecting Ferran catches her voice at a crack of tragedy, or in a delirious moment trips off her first line of coke like a kooky Bacchante. The text full of wink and skirling laughter brings you up short with a sudden stitch, and there’s a fantastic permission to explore. Ferran though inhabits this down to such preternatural twitchiness – as well as knowingness – that you feel she’s oracular.

Blink and you’d miss Warden’s edgy identification with her mother: she’s signalling a classic move. Cults often crack open people’s natural defences at a vulnerable moment. Poets like Lynette Roberts and Rosemary Tonks were lost this way, and tough-minded composer Elizabeth Lutyens relates how she alone of her family escaped the cult of the boy Krishnamurti – in the 1910s. As indeed did Krishnamurti later. There’s a long British tradition, full of distinguished damage.

Warden describes her mother Ana as like her ‘if you know me’: many do in her Court Press role. Ana with the sassy job and smart car is a superb mum till Warden’s ten, and those iterated rituals crumble with her old name. Unhooking from a Byzantine family of seven siblings with three mothers and mainly one father is always going to be difficult and Warden narrates how she chooses to stay behind and simply visit when her mother abandons England, and her.

‘It’s hard work and you need to be completely not a twat yourself if you want any success in this.’ Such artfully wrought teenage speak not only pinpoints a moment, it shows how Warden, now 35, connects with her own teenage language: she enjoys a true ear for its arc and throwaway burn. Descended matrilineally from Nicholas II’s last secretary Warden’s insouciant ‘If I had been a normal girl… I would have been excited… that basically I was a Russian princess’ seems throwaway too. But it’s her amputee Russian grandmother who pivots the story.

With a new partner ‘Moron’, Mum emigrates to Canada at the behest of the new cult they’re inducted into. The wonderful attentions, the calendrical surprises fall away and by the end a casual birthday gift of gold-painted sea-shells endures a fitting apotheosis. Warden describes an arc of loyalty tested, warped back and finally snapping: you’d feel the heartbreak more if you weren’t laughing. Set-pieces include Ana trying to relieve Warden of two facial scars by non-tactile healing…

One of Warden’s earliest feats is to inexplicably starve Sam the cat, the mystery solved in her own Whiskas breath. So there’s the slightest chance that Warden, Junior Karate champion by twelve, will follow her mum into the shadows and bow suppliant before cult leader Natashiralandi? ‘In life you are either inherently naughty or not.’ You’re not surprised to find Warden’s graphically healthy Canadian explorations of drink, drugs, teen bonding, gangsta rap, sex and jail somehow fail to bend the knee and ‘disappoint’.

That’s key to the way apparently benign cults work. Upside-down in a crashed car mum sends out ‘for ‘silent healing‘ from Natashiralandi. Right….. After forty minutes it wasn’t fuckin Natashiralandi who turned up and rescued us, it was Wincanton’s fire brigade, alerted to the situation by a local farmer.’ But retrospectively Ana attributes it to Natashiralandi somehow placing the farmer in the right spot. This is true of whatever cult you’re in, whether it’s a Buddhist offshoot order or perhaps a Trotskyian cell who believe in Marxist aliens bringing Marxist rule to earth (no, they do or really did exist).

The pull and denouement of My Mum’s a Twat needs to be seen, and Ferran’s way with the splintering epilogue is deeply affecting. It’s not of course a tidy one; Warden doesn’t neatly tie everything, yet knows how to divine an ending.

Warden’s determination too to root out cult abuse might seem dramatic. It isn’t. As you read this a girl of five is being inducted by her mother into quite a well-thought-of cult: she’ll be a Handmaiden of Isis. No, not Margaret Attwood, and not the Isis you think. Warden’s play is the first to call this out from the inside, and does so in such a definitive manner it ought to play everywhere. About 70% of Brighton’s population must know someone touched by cults. So its Festival might be a start, after Edinburgh. Beyond this though is the thrill of a debut writer with the tang of their own voice stinging the air. As Warden says about something else: ‘You’ll have to take my word on that.’ So see it.

Published January 16, 2018January 16, 2018 by Simon Jenner