Jewish mothers have taken centre stage this week.
But, as the new play How to Survive Your Mother, confirms, not all Jewish mothers are as loving and caring as depicted in Smother and Joyfully Jewish’s Falling Berries and The Last Will and Testament of Sheila Goodwin.
How to Survive Your Mother, written by award-winning BBC journalist-turned- playwright Jonathan Maitland, is a performance about his mother. Jonathan appears as himself in the play and, as he says at the outset, “this play is not ‘based’ on a true story, it is true”.
His charismatic mother was a crazy, glamorous, narcissistic, scandal-loving Jewish woman, who transformed their Surrey home into Britain’s first-ever gay hotel.
This name of this larger-than-life woman, as she proudly proclaimed to anyone who asked, was “Berouia, containing every one of the five vowels”. But there was a dark side to this female powerhouse with a blatant disregard for authority and a fearsome determination to get her own way, taking whatever steps (legal or otherwise) needed to achieve her goals.
The play is as much about Maitland as it is about his mother. Staged with a simple set – a series of metal crates that are used very effectively – it has a cast of five with three people portraying Maitland at different stages of his life, and Emma Davies is very much the star of the show playing the mother Berouia and Maitland’s wife.
Sent away to boarding school aged just three, Johnny’s relationship with his mother was an understandably difficult one. But Maitland’s playwriting skill ensures that it is not a sad story – it may at times shock, but its fast-paced action is filled with comedy, music from the 1970s and Berouia’s irreverence and irrepressible sense of fun that engages the audience from the very start.
As a child Johnny asks why the family name Mehlman is anglicised to Maitland and his mother, who when asked always claimed to be half Spanish and half French, tells her young son the reason: “We are Jews. They all hate us.”
A Jewish mother is also the focus of a new exhibition at JW3 – The Fantastic Life of Minnie Rubinski. You can read more about this here.
How to Survive Your Mother is at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington until 24 November. kingsheadtheatre.com
Joyfully Jewish – a trilogy of three plays – is on Sunday 24 November at the Libra Theatre Café in Chalk Farm at 7.30pm as part of Tsitsit, the Jewish fringe festival. tsitsitfringe.org
