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Patsy Ferran in My Mum’s a Twat at the Royal Court.
The ‘sprite-like’ Patsy Ferran in My Mum’s a Twat at the Royal Court. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer
The ‘sprite-like’ Patsy Ferran in My Mum’s a Twat at the Royal Court. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer

My Mum’s a Twat review – a witty teenage confessional

This article is more than 6 years old

Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, London
The naturally comic Patsy Ferran shines in Anoushka Warden’s punchy autobiographical monologue about growing up the child of a cult follower

Anoushka Warden’s spicy first play comes with a touch of alchemy. After all, as in a fairytale, she is the youngest of seven children. She has magicked what could have been a tear-soaked memoir into a rap. Having learned about gangsta rap from one of her sibs, Warden was never drawn to Celine Dion’s wanness but to Tupac Shakur’s Hit ’Em Up. Inured to some misogyny and violence, she found it empowering.

My Mum’s a Twat throws a punch: at her mother, at the movement that seduced her, at the journalists who didn’t listen to her when she tried to tell her story. When Warden was 12 – she is now 34 – her attentive mother was swept up by a cult. She became set on “healing” (failing to cure her daughter’s scars) and meditation, a path she was persuaded had to be pursued in Canada, persisting even when her daughter said she wouldn’t go with her. So Warden went to live with her father in Devon, visiting the Canadian cult in the hols. Where she had a mostly good, that’s to say, bad teenage time. Delivering coke with pizza, drying out skunk in her bedside cabinet, having her first Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

Written in two weeks, and written with flair, this “true story filtered through a hazy memory” has the power of compulsive confession and its unevenness: the extraordinary is jumbled with routine teenage angst; it ricochets rather than builds. Added dash comes from Vicky Featherstone and Jude Christian’s production – swoony music encloses woo-woo moments – and in Chloe Lamford’s lovely teenage-bedroom design: some spectators sit on beanbags; trolls (old-style) line up on a shelf.

Marvellous Patsy Ferran is Warden. Always able to appeal directly to the audience she is sprite-like, often appearing less as a character than a mood. Her feet slide as if she were skating; her features swivel all over her face. She is a natural comic with a seam of sadness. Physically unlike the dramatist – known to much of the audience on press night as the Court’s press officer – she catches her restless mischief: tapping on a keyboard, her feet move as if longing to dance away. She has only one fault: she allows for no rest between vivid moments. She can’t, you see, bear to be boring. And she is not.

My Mum’s a Twat is at the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, London, until 20 January

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