Guest Blog: Michael Cabot On MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD

The decision to revisit My Mother Said I Never Should was not a difficult one. London Classic Theatre originally produced the play back in 2000 as our second national tour, and I have very fond memories of the production.

As a company, it feels as if we have come a long way from those early, tentative steps in regional theatre. This new revival of the play will be our 39th touring production in 18 years, and it's fair to say that our touring model in the early days was very different from now.

We frequently covered hundreds of miles a week, playing a huge variety of venues, from studio venues to converted church halls, tiny arts centres to large repertory houses. The terrific cast of four, my indefatigable stage manager and I travelled up and down the country, mostly stopping at theatres for a single performance. Arriving at 9am, with a busy day ahead, we would rarely begin making tracks towards the next venue before midnight.

In those early days for LCT, I travelled with the show as a de facto Assistant Stage Manager, sticking down endless plywood paving stones, helping with costume changes, sweeping up and generally running around backstage. It was a blur of lightning-quick costume changes, misplaced hair grips and countless tissues. It was also an invaluable and very steep learning curve.

Returning to the play 18 years later, much has changed for me on a personal level. Back then, in my early thirties, I was not yet a parent. I now have three children of my own, and while I'm not sure that this necessarily makes me more qualified to have a view on the dynamics within the play, it has certainly altered my perspective.

This time around, the focus in rehearsal has been less about logistics and staging per se and much more about finding ways to understand and connect with the characters, investigating their given realities at the various stages of their lives.

I'm not sure I'm a better director than I was nearly a generation ago, but my approach to the work has definitely changed. I ask more questions of the actors and encourage them to be more inquisitive, dig deeper. An instinctive, clear, motivated choice that comes from the actor will always be more powerful and effective than any suggestion a director can make.

My Mother Said I Never Should is my fourth collaboration with designer Bek Palmer. We have worked on two Pinter plays, Betrayal and The Birthday Party, and Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Each collaboration has been very different, and this is no exception.

I love the way that Bek has a powerful, instinctive response to a play and is uncompromising in delivering that vision in her design. Every time we've worked together, she has given me an exciting, challenging space to navigate. In Waiting for Godot, she designed a frozen lake with a series of stepping stones across it, with trees suspended in the air.

This time, she has imagined a gritty urban wasteground, where the children come to play. It's a dangerous space, covered in debris, with an old tyre for a swing, a huge metal fence and a bombed-out building in the background. Everything we use during the show inhabits the space, so it has to become several locations, in subtly different ways.

My cast are fantastic. As a company, we try and strike a balance between working with new faces and maintaining relationships with our core company of actors. In this instance, I've worked with all of cast before, though none of them have worked with each other. There is a lovely shorthand in the rehearsal room when you already have a gauge of how an actor works.

As a play about the lives of four women from one family, it was important to draw on the personal experiences of everyone in the rehearsal room. I'd like to think that my rehearsal room is a place where anyone can say exactly what they think and feel safe in doing so. We discussed the play and the characters a lot during the early days of rehearsal, and now we are on tour, the value of that work shows itself on a daily basis.

Every time I watch the show, there is always one or more special, revealing moments on stage, and I think back to where those thoughts first began, over a cup of coffee and cake in the first week of rehearsal.

Michael Cabot is the Artistic Director of London Classic Theatre

Find full tour dates and venues for My Mother Said I Never Should

Photo credit: Sheila Burnett

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