Last Updated on September 30, 2025
The messy underbelly of motherhood
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
M is a woman. She’s in the first stages of her career, but is already a successful playwright. She’s married. And as Jane Upton’s play starts, she becomes a mother – surely now she has everything?
Holding her baby girl, she promises “I’ll be perfect for you.” Real life, though, soon intervenes. It starts with her breast-feeding problems being airily dismissed by an overworked midwife, and goes all the way downhill from there, in a rollercoaster of unravelling emotions, inexplicable decisions and frustrated attempts to make her voice heard over the cacophony of other voices telling her what she should be feeling/doing. And then there’s the tremendous loneliness of it all.
Throughout the play’s unbroken 90-minutes’ duration M comes across as increasingly imperfect. Suffering from constant fatigue and sleep deprivation, her self-hatred festers; her child becomes a burden she can’t shift, and her attempts to have her own life outside motherhood appear doomed. It turns out if you’re a woman you can’t have everything after all.
If all this sounds downbeat and depressing, (the) Woman is the very opposite. Served by exceptional dialogue – crackling, fizzing, scabrous, very in-your-face and very, very funny – Angharad Jones’s intelligent direction, and a remarkable quartet of actors, led by the compelling Lizzy Watts as M, it is entirely engaging and often laugh out loud funny. And its barbs land quite expertly.
Often self-referential, the play is structured like a metaplay, flitting effortlessly between scenes from life and what could be chapters from M’s new play. Short scenes with titles projected onto the backcloth, present ever more histrionic events in her life/play. “All the losers I’ve dated” (I paraphrase slightly) tells of a cringe-making encounter with a former boyfriend, who earns a living selling used towels in a street market, but still feels authorised to talk down to her, saying he expected her to do better than simply become a mother.
In “Ultimatum” she tries and fails to explain to her husband that she’s knackered all the time”: ‘Why would I want to have sex” (I paraphrase again) “when I feel gross?”
And to her husband’s exasperated demand, “What do you want?” she replies with one of the few very quietly poignant moments of this play: “Connection, intimacy.”
Her by now severely battered self-esteem (you wonder if she had any to begin with) suffers another blow at a meeting with the producers of her previous hits, who are naturally eager for her next bit of money-making magic. Her “baby brain” can’t order her thoughts sufficiently to present her pitch – the play on motherhood we are actually watching – in a convincing manner. The producers speak over her. Why doesn’t she go for a thriller, the producers ask. Better still “a sci-fi thriller”? And if she is intent on introducing a child, then maybe go for a clairvoyant, crime-fighting baby?
“The Big Night Out” with her best friend brings little respite.
And neither does a meeting her agent, who firmly shuts down the notion of motherhood as an interesting theme.
To complicate matters, a couple of years after the birth of her daughter she accidentally falls pregnant and gives birth to a sickly boy. The previous problems are multiplied by a factor of thousands.
Caught in this maelstrom – how much of this did I choose, she wonders – she sees her contemporaries winning awards, even as her dreams turn to dust. That flat in New York with panoramic views over the city skyline? No, it’s never going to happen.
But I think that’s perhaps what doesn’t quite work with this play. Most women, mothers or not, can feel the societal pressure to accept motherhood and its demands with good grace. Equally, much more is known now about the effect on body and brain of pregnancy, hormone imbalance, damage to women’s nether regions, and constant sleep-deprivation, in short, the messy realities of motherhood.
However, M seems an extreme case of permanent discombobulation, unrealistic ambitions (a flat in New York, really?) and a propensity to make the wrong decisions. An extreme character does, of course, present the issues in full technicolour, as it were, and that must have been the playwright’s intention; but it’s hard to accept that she represents Everywoman as the title appears to suggest; and ultimately a hard to love character such as M creates a barrier to empathy.
(the) Woman runs at the Park Theatre from 24/09 to 25/10
Park Theatre
Clifton Terrace
Finsbury Park
London
N4 3JP
Looking for something different? We recommend The Weir, currently showing at the Harold Pinter.
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