At the risk of spoiling the surprise ending, this collection of post-natal confessions and shared maternal outpourings carefully assesses the pros and cons of motherhood before finally, even radically, coming down in favour of it. Peter Crawley reviews Mum's the Word at the Pavilion, Dun Laoghaire.
This is quite reassuring. Because after innumerable tales of sleep deprivation, sex deprivation and, more routinely, dignity deprivation, Mum's The Word could so easily have talked us into calling a halt to this messy project we call the human race.
Written by six Canadian actresses, all of whom had experienced the joys, and now a slick international franchise, Mum's The Word is far more concerned with the state of motherhood than its vomiting, defecating and occasionally loveable products. From an early speech, nicely played by Isobel Mahon in the birth position, it is a largely uncomplicated delivery.
That the show deals exclusively in shop-worn clichés is understandable; the laughter and the audience it courts is one of easy recognition. Thus assured, it never bothers to find interesting ways to present those clichés - the chummy semi-circle is imported direct from The Vagina Monologues, the maternal observations could have been clipped from any number of lifestyle features.
Hired on condition that they were mothers themselves (let's hope that producer Robert C Kelly never stages Medea), the performers' contract almost acknowledges that Charlotte Bradley, Isobel Mahon, Lise-Ann McLoughlin, Briana Corrigan, Eileen Gibbons and Jenny Maher have little else to work with here.
The script simply assigns them rigid personality traits - sardonic, scatty, resentful, fretful - together with pre-wrapped moments of poignancy, salty-cutesy anecdotes and increasingly tiresome running gags in its hunt for a one-size-fits-all style of universal identification.
Curiously, the production itself seems to have been immaculately conceived - no designer is credited - which is particularly odd given the wit and consideration of its staging. Dwarfed by a child's crayon drawing of a house, it's the mothers who are presented as infantile; stripping off to squirt breast milk at each other, carefully describing the foaming brown sludge of a nappy slop bucket, and - in Gibbons's case - streaking across the stage naked. Twice.
As mother knows, taboos are invariably funny and social humiliation is the most effective punchline, but, bewilderingly, the show's gender politics come straight from the same kindergarten.
Men, we understand, are usually pathetic and generally reprehensible, but when we learn that a mother must stay at home while her partner works, because, "our society separates our worlds so completely" you wonder which society - or even which world - she's referring to. "What is the big deal with this shared experience?" asks McLoughlin's enjoyably arch single-mother. Sadly I can't answer. But she might enquire with the box office. Until May 6
