Electro Studios Project Space, May 2023

This is the latest project in the House of Us series. A new monologue written by my 20-year-old daughter, Maia. She wrote numerous diaries during her painful teenage years in Nice, whilst I was trying to juggle being a single mother of two children and running a vast National theatre. It was a difficult time for my family, as I was no longer available enough to be the “good mother” I had always tried to be. Six years later, Maia has edited her adolescent texts into a tragi-comic monologue about the trials and tribulations of a theatre child adrift, a middle-school dropout wandering the lanes of downtown Vieux-Nice, with no parental supervision, lovesick, lost, and endlessly getting herself into trouble…

This project is an amazing opportunity for me, as a mother, to make up for lost time and exorcise this difficult period through collaborating with my daughter on her first solo show. We are in the first stages of this new piece, but it already has the potential of becoming a hilarious yet moving one-woman show. Her texts, punctuated by videos, live music and songs, evoke the existential soul of a poetic young girl, influenced by Sartre, Tolstoy, Shirley Bassey, and like her mother… old romantic Hollywood movies.