Novelist Sarah Moss has expressed surprise at the relative lack of literature about parenthood. We are all children of someone, many of us parents too, and she finds it odd that so few representations of such a common experience exist.
In her 2011 novel Night Waking, she combines the story of Anna, an Oxford academic worn ragged by bringing up her boys, Raphael and Moth, with a historical investigation into infant mortality. It is set on a deserted Hebridean island, where her neglectful husband Giles – so lightly drawn, he is scarcely a character at all – is preoccupied by tracking the declining puffin population. The novel juxtaposes the messy business of 21st-century child-rearing with speculations on the parental attitudes of an even messier past.
Universal though child-rearing may be, one parent’s sleep-deprived night is much like another’s. On the page, Anna’s attempts to pursue a career while catering to the demands of a needy toddler and a fatalistic seven-year-old, although repetitious and familiar, do at least gather a sort of delirious intensity. On the stage, by contrast, the lack of tonal variation is wearing.
This is especially the case given the decision by writer Shireen Mula and director Rebecca Atkinson-Lord of An Tobar and Mull Theatre to adapt the book for a single actor. There is some sense in this: the novel is told entirely from Anna’s put-upon perspective. But however sharply actor Nicola Jo Cully marks the transitions from character to character – and she marks them very sharply indeed – it is a laborious way to tell a story.
Against Hugo Dodsworth’s large-scale projections of island landscapes, Cully captures the stresses and insecurities of a multitasking mother, but a production that seems to want to make a point about rural deprivation comes across as a more trivial tale of self-absorption.
