On the last weekend of July 2024, I had the privilege to see two excellent performances in Coventry. In the B2 studio of the Belgrade Theatre, Kelly Jones’ My Mother’s Funeral: The Show was on, just before starting its UK-wide tour. And in the King Henry VIII School, we welcomed the student theatre group TUDORS from Dresden again, who played Winter Miller’s In Darfur, and their own touring will soon continue as well in Germany and in Poland.
Both plays tackle huge social problems. My Mother’s Funeral: The Show is a recent work, inspired by the 126% rise in funeral costs in the UK in the last twenty years, and how people increasingly struggle paying them. In Darfur was written in 2007, but its main subject, the genocide, warfare, and (both general and gender-based) violence in the Darfur region of Sudan unfortunately still continues to this day. Even though the one was performed by a professional cast and the other by university students, both shows ultimately managed to reach their goal: to make us care.
My Mother’s Funeral: The Show, directed by Charlotte Bennett, features three recurring actors. Abigail, played marvellously by Nicole Sawyerr, has recently lost her mum, but being a freelance playwright from the working class (just like writer Kelly Jones herself), she struggles to pay for the funeral she thinks her mother wished for. The outside world is played by Debra Baker and Samuel Armfield through various different characters. Many people are unsupportive or indifferent towards Abigail’s troubles, but the Director at the theatre offers a possible way out: she should write a strong and realistic play which he can put on show and pay her royalties. Desperate, Abigail decides to dedicate the new play to her mother’s recent death and her own inability to pay for the funeral.
In Darfur, directed by Marc Lalonde, has a bigger cast, with four of them also playing multiple characters. There are three protagonists, however, who get the most stage time: Anna Lena Scholz as Hawa the Darfuri woman, Samuel Siering as Carlos the aid worker, and Annika Tarassenko as Maryka the reporter. Darfur is in utter chaos, with militiamen, officers and rebel groups doing whatever they want, dehumanising and destroying whoever they perceive as enemy, killing children, raping women, devastating the whole region. Hawa, a young teacher, hopes to seek support from aid workers in the refugee camp, having suffered multiple traumas. Maryka, local correspondent for the New York Times, is outraged by the horrors she sees and wants Darfur to be on the headlines, so that the whole world becomes aware. However, to make it both credible and relatable, her editor (played by Leonard Schiller) asks for real names and faces. And the Darfuris, fearing for their life, insist on staying anonymous. What can possibly come out of this…?
Even though the two works root in different geographic and social contexts, they both ask uncomfortable yet quintessential questions of representation. Abigail eventually realises that her real-life loving relationship with her mother is not interesting enough for the Director, and she has to distort it into something more dramatic, troublesome, and in the end more stereotypical. She has to decide what is more important: a ‘dignified’ funeral to her mum, or a ‘dignified’ representation of hers on stage. And Maryka, obviously, has to decide whether she publishes someone like Hawa’s name and picture in the newspaper, giving Darfuris a chance for international media coverage, but risking Hawa’s own life.
How the playwright and the journalist eventually decide would be too much of a spoiler, but I can still reveal that the climax of My Mother’s Funeral: The Show is the most beautiful and tender dialogue between two women I have recently seen, whereas In Darfur operates with a heartbreaking monologue alongside various well-written dialogues, daring to constantly switch from wry humour to the most heartbreaking drama and back.
Both plays use the studio conditions wisely. In My Mother’s Funeral: The Show, the only piece of scenery is a small podium in the middle, which is used in various ways depending on what the respective scenes need. Student creators of In Darfur go along with the minimalism of the school setting, only using a few chairs and tables, and a projector with which they showcase real-life ‘background’ images, making the actors who play fictional characters at arm’s length from the real Darfur. A simple yet straightforward solution.
What makes these two plays so strong is, I assume, the deep personal involvement of their respective playwrights. Knowing Kelly Jones’ background, one really has to wonder how much of Abigail’s story is actually autobiographical. And Winter Miller’s reporter character also seems to have a real-life model: namely, when the author collected interview materials at the Sudan border with genocide survivors which the play is based on, he did it with the support of Nicholas Kristof who is indeed a columnist of the New York Times.
It was an honour to see two awesome shows like this, and I warmly recommend both of them to their future respective audiences.
My Mother’s Funeral: The Show
Belgrade Theatre, 25 July 2024 (First Preview)
Writer: Kelly Jones. Director: Charlotte Bennett. Cast: Nicole Sawyerr, Debra Baker, Samuel Armfield.
In Darfur
The TUDORS from Dresden, King Henry VIII School, 27 July 2024
Writer: Winter Miller. Director: Marc Lalonde. Assistant: Anny Lenhardt. Cast: Anna Lena Scholz, Samuel Siering, Annika Tarassenko, Leonard Schiller, Michelle Hoffmann, Alan Kist, Ruben Helmut Hahn, Janne Wilhelms, Elisa Springer, Julian Fischer.
Author’s note: this review was written on my own accord, and I wasn’t present at the First Preview performance in the Belgrade Theatre and at the performance by the TUDORS as a representative of the press, but as a member of the audience.
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