Broken Water, Michèle Winstanley’s powerful new play, is an unapologetic expression of motherhood in all its messy permutations from the goriness of fertility and pregnancy to loss.
Nicola Samer skilfully directs three women who face the audience head-on as they smash wide open dangerously romanticised versions of the female experience, exposing motherhood for what it really is: a physically and mentally tortuous journey full of love and anguish. From breaking waters in pregnancy through to mortality in fertility and life-threatening accidents, there’s much pain and laughter condensed into an hour and a half of gripping theatre.
Perhaps the play’s greatest strength is held in the writing, as Winstanley’s witty dialogue hits us hard with direct, unsparing detail. From a mother witnessing the death of a son to a young woman cradling her dead foetus in her hand, no bigger than the size of a “butterbean”, the sentimental stakes run high.
Every aspect of maternal angst is meticulously covered as the women take turns to share snippets of their lives. They come from different backgrounds, generations and experiences. There’s the older Olive (Rosemary Ashe), who is plagued by traumatic images of the past fuelled by perpetual worry that all mothers everywhere feel for their children. A deep pathos imbues Ashe's performance as she draws us in to her world with light-hearted nattering about her charity bought shoes, only to lead us to tragedy with the news of her son's death.
Then middle-aged Philippa (Miranda's Sarah Hadland) is genuinely funny and acerbic in her observations as she deals with her last child heading off to Edinburgh, leaving her house empty, so ventures on a quest to find new meaning outside of mothering. Patronised during an interview in her former field of publishing, she finds better luck serving coffee in her local park café.
Linda (Naomi Petersen) as the youngest of the trio speaks of the heart-wrenching struggle of trying and failing to conceive. She talks about the fertility trauma breezily, as if we are neighbours over the fence discussing the price of eggs. Linda’s plight is only worsened by unhelpful comments about how she should feel in her pursuit of pregnancy, from strangers in medical corridors to friends. “When you give up trying, you’ll get pregnant,” Linda regales, shrugging her shoulders and arms upwards to the audience, eyes widening in disbelief.
Dramatic pace veers from engaging, witty banter, escalating to hysterical dramatic outpourings. Mostly this works, but sometimes the move from chatty to angry gesticulations is too speedy for the audience to catch up in terms of joining the actors on their emotional journey.
However, all three performers are excellent. Petersen is almost childlike in her optimistic desperation to hold onto a pregnancy as she rattles off one miscarriage story after another. Hadland’s witticisms bring a welcome relief from all the high drama, and Ashe’s Olive is vulnerable, almost innocent in her search for resolve, despite being the eldest of the three women.
The stage is simply set out. Three wooden chairs used to reconfigure the space to create different settings as well as used as props to thrust out at the audience as if the chairs are weapons used to rail against the world.
In the small studio downstairs the Arcola, it felt as if this play was speaking directly to me, and I suspect many women will identify similarly. Lending voice to the personal, often undocumented stories of motherhood gives the play its strength and sadness, creating an intimate experience that resonates. Yet such drama can be universally appreciated across the genders, parents or otherwise, for its honest gaze at the human struggle, implicating us all as we journey through our lives.