My Mother Said I Never Should Essays

My Mother Said I Never Should Essays My Mother Said I Never Should Essay My Mother Said I Never Should Essay Essay Topic: Play 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. 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.