My Mother Said I Never Should Essay Example

My Mother Said I Never Should Essay When looking for my contemporary monologue I at first wasnt sure what kind of monologue I wanted, I knew I wanted one which showed quite a bit of emotion but as to which monologue I should of chose I was stuck on. I eventually found one monologue its called my mother said I never should by Charlotte Keatley. The play is about difficult relationships between mothers and daughters. It goes forwards and backwards between 1905 and 1987. It shows the lives of four generations of women, their loves, expectations and choices throughout their lives. They are set against the huge social changes on the twentieth century. In the scene from which my monologue came from it is in 1987, Jackie is in her mid-thirties and she runs an art gallery in manchester. She has a very successful life but has a very painful secret. In the the early seventies at the age of nineteen she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter Rosie. She couldnt handle the demands of single parenthood after Rosies father moved away with another woman. She then had to give Rosie up under pressure from her mother, and so she was brought up by her grandparents. We will write a custom essay sample on My Mother Said I Never Should specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on My Mother Said I Never Should specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on My Mother Said I Never Should specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer Later on one Margaret who Rosie thought was her mother had just died from cancer, Rosie was going through paperwork only to find her birth certificate. That is when she found out that Jackie was her actual mother and Jackie then trys to explain herself. Jackie- How dare you! (Goes to hit Rosie but cannot. ) Youre at the centre of everything I do! (Slight pause. ) Mummy treated me as though Id simply fallen over and cut my knee picked me up and said youll be all right now, it wont show much. She wanted to make it all better. (Quiet. ) †¦ She was the one who wanted it kept secret †¦ I wanted you, Rosie. Angry. ) For the first time in my life I took care of myself refused joints, did exercises, went to the clinic. (Pause. ) Its a girl. (Smiles irresistibly. ) After youd gone I tried to lose that memory. (Pause. Effort. ) Graham †¦ your father. (Silence. ) He couldnt be there the day you were born, he had to be in Liverpool. He was married. (Emphatic. ) He loved me, he loved you, you must believe that! (Pause. ) He said hed leave his wife, but I knew he wouldnt; there were two young children, the youngest was only four †¦ wed agreed, separate lives, I wanted to bring you up. He sent money. (Pause. ) I took you to Lyme Park one day, I saw them together, across the lake, he was buying them ice creams, his wife was taking a photo. I think they live in Leeds now, I saw his name in the Guardian last year, an article about his photographs †¦ (Pause. ) It was a very cold winter after you were born. There were power cuts. I couldnt keep the room warm; there were no lights in the tower blocks; I knew he had an open fire, it was trendy; so we took a bus to Didsbury, big gardens, pine kitchens, made a change from concrete. I rang the bell. (Stops. ) A Punjabi man answered, said he was sorry †¦ theyd moved. By the time we got back to Moss Side it was dark, the lift wasnt working (Stops. ) That was the night I phoned Mummy. (Difficult. ) Asked her. (Pause. ) I tried! I couldnt do it, Rosie. (Pause. ) It doesnt matter how much you succeed afterwards, if youve failed once. (Pause. ) After youd gone †¦ I kept waking in the night to feed you †¦ A week †¦ in the flat †¦ Then I went back to art school. Sandra and Hugh thought I was inhuman. I remember the books hat came out that winter how to succeed as a single working mother fairytales! (Pause. ) Sandra and Hugh have a family now. Quite a few of my friends do. (Pause. ) I could give you everything now. Rosie? †¦ In this monologue I could see that the short sentances punctuated by pauses and silences, bursts of anger and overemphasis show how difficult it is for Jackie. I thought about how hard it must be to tell your daughter that you gave her away, Jackie has now lost her mother and wasnt there for her in time to say goodbye. Now her relationship with her daughter is at stake. Jackie who is guilt and grief stricken she trys to offer a fractured explanation for what she did. You can see that she is still trying to hold on to the myth that the father of Rosie still loves them both as she trys to get Rosie to also belive it. I thought that this monologue was a very good emotional one. I feel that I could perform this fairly well as I can look at the emotion and I can portray it fairly well. The second monologue I looked at was called Cant stand up for falling down by Richard Cameron. The play is set in a coal mining town in South Yourkshire on a stretch down by the River Don. It is about three young women, all deeply affected by the death of a local man, all with a good reason to hate the heartless town bully, Royce Boland. The story starts to unfold through looking at each of their perspectives and series of monologues which are often addressed directly to the audience. Lynette is a working class Yorkshire woman of twenty-two. She married Royce at eighteen but has lived to regret it. She was brought up to belive that marriage is sacred and you must try your hardest to make it work. But Royce is a violent drunk man who beats, demeans and terrorises her. Royce forced her to give up her job in the coal board offices and now she stays home cooks, cleans and sometimes works in their fish tackle shop. Every now and then she shows a bleak sense of humor. There are moments throughout where she is sorry and things improve for a while. It shows in her monologue that it is true hatred that runs through her for him. My Mother Said I Never Should Essay Example My Mother Said I Never Should Paper 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. We will write a custom essay sample on My Mother Said I Never Should specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on My Mother Said I Never Should specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on My Mother Said I Never Should specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer Another example would be that Jackies career and opportunity for the future couldve been destroyed because she fell pregnant with Neils baby, and soon after, Neil abandons her. 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.