Chipping Norton play shows all the changes we've been through

“I'm in luv, mother,” announces Margaret. “Excellent,” observes director John Terry, “It’s good that you’re sneaking that line out by speaking it into a sheet.”

The sheet in question hangs on a washing line strung across the studio at the Theatre, Chipping Norton. Rehearsals for Chippy’s new production of Charlotte Keatley’s play My Mother Said I Never Should are at an early stage when I visit, and sheet choreography is still under discussion: “It’s about getting the right rhythm when you’ve got two sheets to fold,” John explains to his cast.

John is plainly revelling in the chance to mount another new professional production at Chipping Norton’s 200-seat theatre. Arriving in 2008 from the National Theatre, with it’s multi-million-pound budgets, he has steadily built on Chippy’s already nationally famous reputation for being the smallest theatre in Britain to stage its own professional panto each Christmas. This is his sixth “straight play” production at Chippy, and the lack of money for big-budget sets worries him not at all: “You can create a 1960s atmosphere simply by having a transistor radio on stage,” he points out.

Critically acclaimed when it was written exactly 30 years ago, My Mother Said has since been performed across the globe in 22 different languages. Featuring a cast of four women, the play charts the lives and expectations of four generations of mothers and daughters through the many changes and upheavals of the 20th century. This means that during the course of the play each actor has to age almost all the way from the cradle to the grave.

“Because of the quick-fire nature of the play I can’t rely on changes of hair or make-up to make me look older, so I just slow down as required!” laughs Sue McCormick, who is playing Margaret’s mother Doris. “Doris is a bit of a Northern battleaxe, but her heart’s in the right place. She loves her daughter very much, but she’s quite a disappointed woman: she was a teacher, but got married in 1923 when it was illegal to be married and a teacher. So she had to give up her job — although probably her husband would have expected her to anyway.”

So, I ask Sue, would Doris have performed the famed ritual of scrubbing her front step every morning?

“Oh yes, I think she would — the point is made in the play that her house is absolutely spotless: growing up in a little terraced house in Oldham, the step and the windows were what mattered.” A Northerner herself, Sue adds: “There’s a mix of my mother and my grandmother in my characterisation. But it’s all there in the writing; the characters are very true to real life.”

In the scene being rehearsed, a heated exchange develops between mother Doris and daughter Margaret as the generational gap between them is exposed. But there’s humour too: “I may be as old as the Queen Mother,” Doris observes, “But I do buy all my smalls at Top Shop.”

Generation game: Jessica Guise

“Humour is important, because it’s part of the characters,” explains director John Terry. “In two generations they go from working-class Lancashire to someone who has gone to art college and is running a gallery. But one of the things that binds the different generations together is their sense of humour — the way they laugh at each other.

“The genius of the play is that you see such things more than once,” John adds. “It doesn’t run chronologically, so you see echoes and foreshadows of different situations in all sorts of orders. There were these huge headline changes for women in the 20th century: gaining the vote, equal pay, the Sex Discrimination Act, all of those things happened in the course of a hundred years. But there were also a lot of things that remained the same, not least the tussle between having a career and a family. I suppose in a way the play is asking: how much do we really change?”

My Mother Said I Never Should
The Theatre, Chipping Norton
February 27 until March 11
Tickets: 01608 642350 or chippingnortontheatre.com