My Mother Said I Never Should Summary

My Mother Said I Never Should follows the story of four generations of women, a great-grand-daughter a daughter, a mother and a grandmother, grappling with social forces that threaten to split them apart as the twentieth century grows older. Widely studied on Drama syllabuses the play moves back and forth through the lives of the women, it sets the enormous social changes of this century against the needs of the individual.

After reading the play mentioned, my initial sentiments on it were that I highly enjoyed it because I found it highly engaging and very original and abstract by its use of different time frames and using the ‘waste-ground scenes’ as a type of limbo where time is of no consequence and causes the reader to primarily focus on the relationships between each woman.

Nonetheless, I found myself becoming highly confused whilst reading the play due to the constant switching between time frames.

In my opinion, I think the playwright is trying to convey the hidden relationships between women within the same family.

She tries to show how each of the women interact with each other and how the role of women in society can change within each generation. Keatley tries to focus primarily on women and I feel that the men within the play were portrayed as the draw-backs of the women, for example, in the play Margaret becomes highly depressed due to her failing marriage with Ken.

Another example would be that Jackie’s career and opportunity for the future could’ve been destroyed because she fell pregnant with Neil’s baby, and soon after, Neil abandons her.

Get quality help now

Sweet V

Verified

Proficient in: Communication

4.9 (984)

“ Ok, let me say I’m extremely satisfy with the result while it was a last minute thing. I really enjoy the effort put in. ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

The message the playwright was trying to put across is the how the unique bonds between mothers and daughters survives behind closed doors, and how secrecy may slowly destroy a family. The practical problems I foresaw in performing this play were being able to mentally as well as physically change myself into a female child, teenager, adult or old woman.

I also found it challenging to be able to relate to each character and infuse a little part of my personality to each of them. I found I had these problems because I have not experienced some of the things the characters within the play had done. I managed to overcome this by remembering certain plays/television programmes/films I have seen that cover the certain subjects that each character was going through, for example when Jackie fell pregnant, I thought of ‘Lolita’ by Stanley Kubrick when Lolita falls pregnant at 16/17.