What if your mother fakes her own death before your eyes, only to flirt with the ambulance guys moments later? What if she actually commits a crime only to be revealed years later, coercing her 90-year-old lodger into leaving her all his money and properties? What if, your mother claims she’s a half-Spanish, half-French Jew while hiding her true Arab heritage?
Written by Jonathan Maitland and directed by Oliver Dawe, How to Survive Your Mother explores a bizarre mother-child relationship from the 1970s. Maitland performs himself as the narrator, alongside a brilliant cast including Peter Clements, John Wark, Stephen Ventura, Brodie Edwards and Howard Webb. This production tells the story of his glamorous yet narcissistic mother (Emma Davies), who runs an elderly care home before turning it into a gay hotel, all within their home.
Maitland’s relationship with his mother is barely normal. Sent to boarding school at the age of three, he finds his mother forgetting to collect him when the school closes. Meanwhile, she is constantly busy claiming to have terminal diseases, “renewable” after every six months. Even more absurd, when he asks about the facelift scar on her face, she explains it as “cancer of the eyebrows”. And during her divorce, she speeds her car into a severe crash.
Dawe’s direction feels a bit chopped up for the first couple of minutes, featuring vignettes of Maitland’s childhood family life with rapid scene transitions and inexplicable movements, such as characters frequently walking around the stage and gazing at each other. However, the production gradually gains cohesion as the mother’s image becomes more layered and consistent. She’s not merely a nut.
Emma Davies, as the mother, is transfixing. She’s the “devil-in-Prada” of South London with her own charm, vulnerability and sense of insecurity. This theatrical conversion frames her personal psychological issues in a broader socio-cultural landscape. Is she also a business talent, but entrapped in her roles as a wife and mother, unable to realise her own dreams in the age of 70s?
As one of his mother’s many “victims,” Maitland avoids bitter accusations. Instead, in this theatrical adaptation of his 2006 memoir, he raises compelling questions. Is it legitimate, or even ethical, to expose personal childhood “trauma” to the public? What is the point of the playwright standing onstage, and is it another form of being self-indulgent, just like his mother? Last but not least, how can survivors become better parents? Maitland inserts scenes of himself as a playwright, in dialogue with his wife/therapist, tackling these questions and inviting the audience to reflect.
In psychological terms, Maitland’s mother might fit the profile of someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder—overtly snobby, deceptive, manipulative, and tyrannical. But as Maitland himself remarks in the end, theatre is not a psychiatrist’s room for diagnosis, and it needs no justification.
How To Survive Your Mother is at King’s Head Theatre until 24th November
