Mother Has Arrived’, is a new durational performance in a gallery by theatre director and artist Than Hussein Clark it is Clark’s homage to his mother, Martha Fuller Clark.
The production details Martha’s life from her birth in 1942 to the present day, navigating between biography and fiction through verbatim and devised theatre. Narratives were extracted from recorded conversations between the artist and his mother, recently discovered recordings of the artist’s father, and archival audio of historical events. The play is performed by two actors and one prosthetics artist housed within a uniquely conceived glass vitrine stage at the Corvi-Mora gallery in South London.
This deeply personal story is revealed over the play’s six-and-a-half-hour duration, as one actor gradually morphs into Martha now, aged 84, and may be watched in its entirety or in part. Conceived in dialogue with the temporal, spatial, and structural conventions of a gallery exhibition, ‘Mother Has Arrived’ begins the moment that the gallery opens to the public and is timed to finish when the gallery closes, and the Mother arrives. It is written, designed and directed by Than Hussein Clark and produced by The Director’s Theatre Writer’s Theatre.
Clark said: “My mother was part of a generation that grew up believing in both American and Western exceptionalism as well as meritocracy. The promise of democracy. And as we track her to her older age, what we end up tracking is the death of all of those ideas.”
The performance continually interplays Martha’s reality with fiction. Although the premise is Martha’s life story, at the start of the play, the actors are seen preparing for a screen test in an ‘imagined film’ inspired by Hitchcock and serial killer films, directed by a fictional director. By invoking the language of theatrical naturalism, reality is brought into a relationship with fiction. This sets a space for words to be taken out of context, and challenges the ways in which lives might be packaged via biographical conventions.
Important for the play is how Clark has worked with the two actors, in particular, recreating the trope of ‘the gay boy dressing up with his mother’s wardrobe’. The characters’ names ‘Exeter’ (Lewis Blomfield) and ‘Essex’ (Benedict Wishart), are a nod to Shakespearean times, and Hitchcock, a strong inspiration for Clark. The Prosthetics Makeup Artist is Aurora Beadle.
Corvi-Mora gallery, London, between Thurs 4 Sept and Fri 3 Oct from 11.00am to 5.30pm. For more information and to book tickets, visit tdtwt.com/premieres/mother-has-arrived
