My Mum’s a Twat at the Royal Court Theatre

Parents can be really, really, really hard work. Even at their best they can seriously mess you up, let alone when they abandon you to run a healing centre in Canada. That’s the hand dealt to Patsy Ferran’s Girl in My Mum’s a Twat, Anoushka Warden’s consistently witty, surprisingly warm “unreliable version of a true story”.

The whole production is like a glorious time capsule, not only of period detail – troll dolls, David Jason and beanbags are all present in Chloe Lamford’s typically fantastic blue bedroom-cum-personal exhibition – but teenage feeling, specifically the never-easy realisation that our parents are monstrously fallible human beings rather than gift-giving gods. Ferran’s Girl learns that lesson earlier than most when her previously loving mother, now dating a Moron who thinks changing his name from Kevin to Colin is spiritual, is replaced by a person effectively under the control of a Somerset-based cult.

Carrying an 80-minute monologue – twice a night no less – is an imposing task, and one that the ferociously engaging Ferran absolutely smashes. It’s like being in the pub with a mate holding court, pint in hand, as she bares her beautiful, bruised soul. Her journey from juvenile confusion to adolescent snark is brilliantly done: a Zig and Zag jumper swapped for a digits-up Tupac T-shirt, Pharcyde on the stereo instead of Jackson 5, a slight shift in her awkwardly cool, always moving demeanour.

Best is the way that she keeps it all in, the extent of the loss and betrayal perpetuated by her mother only ever briefly coming to the surface. It’s the studied approach of someone who has had years of dealing with parental failings, and knows that if they let the floodgates open it’ll be mighty difficult to make them close.

As a production My Mum’s a Twat is far from perfect, with a story that is perhaps more interesting than the telling; too often it just stacks up amusing teen anecdotes one after another, avoiding the real meat of the mother/daughter relationship. Co-directors Jude Christian and Vicky Featherstone also fail to really inject any non-Ferran-related dynamism, exacerbating the script’s bagginess.

Yet, by the end, Ferran and Warden’s avoidance of cathartic cliché leads My Mum’s a Twat to a pretty complex place. One where acceptance sits uneasily with anger, where the acknowledgement of a parent’s frailties can help you on your own road to recovery, without ever excusing their actions.

Connor Campbell
Photo: Helen Murray

My Mum’s a Twat is at the Royal Court Theatre from 8^th until 20^th January 2018. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.