Can we accept that our parents did what they could without pretending it was enough?
My First and Last Solo Show began as Natalie Rose’s attempt to create an extraordinary gift for her daughter Mabelle using the skills she had: naturally, she made her a theatre show.
Then Mabelle busted in—and what was meant to be a solo became something far more beautiful.
Together, Natalie and Mabelle create a hilarious, tender and deeply affecting exploration of three generations of women. Mabelle plays both herself and Natalie’s mother, Cheryl, allowing daughter and grandmother to occupy the same body as Natalie stands between them: simultaneously somebody’s child and somebody’s mother.
Across the work’s four-year development, Mabelle has grown towards adulthood while Cheryl has experienced cognitive decline following an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. One has years ahead of her to speak; the other is gradually losing access to the memories and language through which her story might be told.
Across layers of sheer fabric, the women at times stand visible to one another but never entirely reachable. The design gives physical form to everything that love cannot automatically overcome: memory, hurt and the limits of what each generation was capable of giving the next.
The production understands that acknowledgement is not the same as blame. Natalie can recognise that Cheryl did what she could while still needing her to acknowledge that what she could do was not always enough. Alzheimer’s makes that need painfully uncertain: what happens when the person you need to remember your childhood can no longer reliably reach it?
But this is never simply a story about inherited pain. It is joyful, wonderfully silly and filled with the ordinary affection through which families actually love one another.
Natalie begins by making something for Mabelle. Its greatest gift is that she allows Mabelle to remake it with her.
📸 Joshua Morris
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