Review: Can Any Mother Help Me?, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until March 7 (From York Press)

Review: Can Any Mother Help Me?, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until March 7

1:24pm Thursday 5th March 2009 in Search By Charles Hutchinson

YOU may recall Foursight Theatre’s all-female work from their 2006 musical Thatcher The Musical!, the one where Maggie had nine lives or at least nine different women playing her.

The Wolverhampton company enjoys looking at history from the perspective of women, unknown, famous or infamous. Maggie would qualify for the famous and infamous, whereas the subjects of Can Any Mother Help Me? fall into the unknown, even secret, category.

Foursight’s devised new work brings to life the secret letters of the Cooperative Correspondence Club, a kind of Desperate Housewives of its day, whose once covert world was brought to public attention in Jenna Bailey’s book in 2007.

The CCC was formed in 1935 after an Irish housewife, weighed down by young children and loneliness, wrote to the Nursery World magazine, asking “Can Any Mother Help Me?” The volume of responses led to the twice-monthly private letter club being established with 24 members, all of them young mothers, whose thoughts would be collated by an editor and sent from member to member in hand-stitched magazine form.

Sarah Thom’s production weaves a path through those lives – not all 24 – from wartime Britain to the club’s end in 1990, opening to the sound of pens on paper and the tapping of keyboards. Jules Bushell’s sound designs and Matt Spencer’s video projections on light boxes that double as windows give a multi-media modernity to a fluid ensemble piece, whereas costume and set design by Naomi Dawson evoke period.

Mary Keith’s haunting music bleeds seamlessly into the narrative, played and sung live by the cast, most notably Samantha Fox on the harp. Movement is exemplary too, whether cast members are linking together in choreographed steps or putting furniture to inventive use, especially in a tea-drinking scene that seems to defy gravity. The revolving staircase, in particular, adds to unbroken flow of a 90-minute play that rightly foregoes an interval.

None of this physicality detracts from the play’s essence: story telling of sincerity, insight and humour down the years of everyday life’s highs and lows, arrivals and departures. These stories do not make the ordinary extraordinary, but emphasise both the diversity and commonality of experience: once intimate secrets now shared to wide impact.

Can Any Mother Help Me?, Foursight Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until Saturday. Box office: 0113 213 7700.