Foursight Theatre present
Can Any Mother Help Me?
The Story of the Cooperative Correspondence Club
A new play inspired by the book by Jenna Bailey
Directed by Sarah Thom
Wednesday 18 – Saturday 21 March
PRESS NIGHT: Wednesday 18 March at 7.45pm
Foursight Theatre Company bring their latest production, Can Any Mother Help Me? to Birmingham Repertory Theatre from Wednesday 18 to Saturday 21 March. Can Any Mother Help Me? is an evocative, dynamic and touching new play based on Jenna Bailey’s best-selling book, bringing to life the funny and often moving stories of a group of early 20th Century women.
In 1935 – long before the internet – a remarkable virtual community was created by desperate young women. A young mother in a lonely Irish village had been abandoned by her husband with four children and very little money. Starved of all educated, human contact, this benighted young mother wrote to The Nursery World magazine, under the pen-name of Ubique, with a heartfelt plea: “Can any mother help me?”. She struck a chord.
From the response, she recruited 24 young mothers to create a virtual community of desperate housewives. The community of the Cooperative Correspondence Club, or CCC as it became known, provided much needed support for isolated women and transformed lives throughout the country.
Like today’s chat-roomers, mail-groupers and bloggers, each member had her own virtual identity, so we hear from Cotton Goods, Elektra, Ad Astra, Accidia, and Yonire as well as Ubique. Members wrote fortnightly on any topic that mattered to them. Ad Astra, the self-appointed editor, bound their letters and sent them round the group in a rota. Each kept the papers for 24 hours, added their own comments and questions, then sent them on. True friendships developed and continued, supporting the mothers for decades.
The CCC was a mutual support system, practical community, advice centre and more. Through its columns mothers could advertise and buy second-hand prams, cots, clothing, toys, books – in fact anything a mother might need. And topics went way beyond the household grind. It tackled issues such as sex, sexism, female orgasm, anti-semitism, racism, education, special needs, inequality and justice head-on.
CCC lasted until 1990 when the letters were donated to the archives of Sussex University and later became a world-wide best-selling book by Jenna Bailey.
Director Sarah Thom joined Foursight Theatre in 2005 to create the role of the Narrator Maggie in Thatcher The Musical! and became co-Artistic Director in 2007. She originally trained with Jacques Lecoq in Paris and at Exeter University and has since worked as an actor, devisor, workshop leader and director. Can Any Mother Help Me? represents Sarah’s first major tour as a director.
Over the last twenty-two years Foursight Theatre has gained an exceptional reputation for creating unusual, uncompromising and multi-disciplinary work, which reviews history through the eyes of women, unknown, famous and infamous. Their most recent successes include Thatcher The Musical! and The Corner Shop, a site-specific piece in West Bromwich.
Cast includes: Helen Cartwright, Jill Dowse, Sam Fox, Frances Land, Catriona Martin and Lucy Tuck. Movement director Brent Lott with design by Naomi Dawson and lighting by Anna Watson.
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