Black British Women’s Theatre by Nicola Abram

Author:Nicola Abram
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030514594
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Fig. 2Desmond Ip, ‘Black Mime Theatre Women’s Troop’ (1990). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Records of Black Mime Theatre, Photographs of Mothers , THM/26/5/5. Publicity photograph. (Left to right: Sky Hunt, Cindy Afflick, Paulina Graham) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

As its title suggests, Mothers explores the lives and trials of several mothers: Sylvie (played by Paulina Graham) cares for her young daughter, Patricia (Cindy Afflick), whilst enduring a violent relationship; Thelma (Cindy Afflick) is emotionally distant from her teenage daughter, Cynthia (Sky Hunt) and unwilling to admit her maturation into womanhood; finally, an adult Cynthia struggles with the demands of raising two children of her own in a metropolitan environment. Lizbeth Goodman described the show as a ‘collage of impressions’ (Goodman 1993a, p. 168), though the three discrete stories do finally cohere into a single narrative: daughters become mothers and call on others for support, showing how patterns of parenting persist across generations.2 In the words of one critic, Mothers is ‘a voyage of discovery, charting the growth of compassion and comprehension until a time when the daughter, now herself a mother, is finally able to say: “I understand”’ (Martin 1990).

In a small audience survey, Lizbeth Goodman found that those attending Mothers were largely female but that the precise demographic depended on the venue: performances at London’s Oval House and Bradford’s Mill theatres drew a high proportion of white women between twenty-one and thirty years of age, many of whom were students, while a performance at The Base in south London—a venue established by the black theatre company Umoja—predominantly attracted black women aged sixteen to thirty (Goodman 1993a, p. 46). In an interview Denise Wong explained that BMT were proactive in reaching black people: before a regional tour the company would identify and contact relevant community leaders, looking to recruit readymade audiences from local interest groups. Indeed, respondents to Goodman’s survey reported that the most effective advertising was through word of mouth rather than printed promotional materials (Goodman 1996, p. 32). The company diligently maintained contact with anyone who attended a production, requesting feedback and keeping a database of their details for marketing purposes.3

Cast members Paulina Graham and Sky Hunt continued into the Women’s Troop’s next production, joined by Syreeta Kumar. Total Rethink premiered on 28 June 1991 at the Unity Theatre in Liverpool, as part of the city’s Festival of Comedy, before a stint at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and an appearance at the British Festival of Visual Theatre at Battersea Arts Centre. The production was financed with £29,500 from ACGB, as well as continuing subsidy from Greater London Arts and London Borough Grants Scheme. It toured until 15 September, totalling twenty-one performances. Unlike the triad of stories structuring Mothers , this forty-five-minute spoof follows a single narrative throughout, mocking the forms and themes of Hollywood action movies through sustained allusion to the film Total Recall (1990) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone. Its all-female cast provocatively queered the heteronormative form of Hollywood film. Total Rethink won the

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