In Michel Tremblay’s Le Vrai Monde? (The Real World?), a playwright angers his parents by writing a fictionalised version of their family life. Tremblay juxtaposes the “real” and invented characters on the same stage – one lot plain speaking, the others exaggerated and obvious.
Something similar happens in Kelly Jones’s unexpectedly funny play about grief. At its centre is Abigail Waller, a hard-up dramatist who bows to the demands of a middle-class director who wants to see a “gritty” version of her working-class life. He has no interest in the fanciful fiction of Astro Mite, her play about gay bugs in space, despite having told her to go anywhere her imagination takes her.
Needing the commission, she writes a supposedly autobiographical play that is all artifice. The sweet-tempered Abigail becomes the badass Stacey, all sweary gangsta moves and aggressive rapping.
It’s a funny switch but behind it is a political purpose. Abigail wants to pay truthful tribute to her late mother. She wants to reflect the reality of living – and dying – in poverty; to show humour and affection, not patronising cliche. But those interpreting her words have so little understanding of her world that they resort to caricature. As her mother’s body sits in the morgue for want of money to move her, a fictionalised mother appears in the rehearsal room who is crude and insulting.
These are two weighty themes – grief and class war – but they are handled by Jones with a lightness of touch and a needling sense of humour. The performances in Charlotte Bennett’s production for Paines Plough are funny and understated: Nicole Sawyerr deadpan and quietly desperate as Abigail; Debra Baker, sweet as the mother, pompous as the leading lady; and Samuel Armfield, blindly entitled as the director, matter-of-fact as the brother. A play that could have been about mourning is actually about dignity.
At Roundabout @ Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 26 August. Then touring until 12 October.
