Writing Motherhood for Contemporary Performance: Three Plays and Thesis

This dissertation investigates the vexed relation between motherhood, creativity and survival through three self-authored plays, two of which I also performed. The first play, This is Not a Festival, is set in 1985 and examines my area of research through the single traveller mother of Danni, charting her and son Leaf’s recovery after a vicious police attack has left them homeless and traumatised; the second, Githa, is a historical biography piece based on the life of twentieth century dramatist Githa Sowerby (1876-1970) whose playwriting career was thwarted by unplanned motherhood at the outbreak of the First World War; the third, Within This Landscape, is an autobiographical exploration of my own maternal heritage and is a homage to my own mother, an artist who died unexpectedly when I was still a child. I contextualise these plays within a historical time span which extends from the 1880s to the present and explore questions of identity, artistic fulfilment, economic independence and domestic confinement for women and ask what has changed or not changed for mothers battling to define themselves in their own right.