Review: Love; Mum – a love letter to mothers, sisters, friends

Erin Harrington reviews Love; Mum, written and directed by Sela Faletolu-Fasi, with choreography from Lapana Soli, Friday 26 January 2024, at Little Andromeda.

It feels a little hand-wavey to say that in the new play Love; Mum, five Pacific women share the joys, disappointments, and heartaches of motherhood. That’s because we live in a culture where mothers are simultaneously ever-present and invisible, and it’s maybe hard to find the richness and language to adequately negotiate the silence around those experiences without it sounding like a greeting card. This excellent work, written and directed by Sela Faletolu-Fasi, and performed by an strong ensemble cast, instead takes full-throated advantage of the medium of live performance to explore these complexities. It brings the audience along on an emotional journey that sits in a very specific Pacific context, but speaks to much wider shared maternal experiences, whether you’re a mum, have mum friends in your life, or are just thinking about your own.

Love; Mum’s characters are thoughtfully drawn, and played consistently with humour, emotional intensity and compassion. Five new mums introduce themselves to the audience, one by one, outlining some of the hopes for, and fears about, motherhood. They first meet at Mums Anonymous, a support group for new mums facilitated with love and care by Whāea Sally (Siu Williams-Lemi). Racheal (Tusi Elisara) is a devout warrior for Jesus whose warmth and energy frequently blows the room apart. Judah (Talia-Rae Mavaega) is a cheerful, perpetually online insta-mum who documents their lives relentlessly across social platforms. Lalelei (Sela Faletolu-Fasi) is an anxious introvert who hides in oversized clothing. Joy (Jenna Pamatangi) will definitely cut you if you cross her: she’s a fierce, foul-mouthed mama bear, but she’s struggling in an abusive relationship. Finau (Tonia Noa Siaosi) most clearly articulates a sense of shame around her maternal ambivalence. She’s an ambitious career woman who loves her kid, but feels grief for the loss of her old way of life and disappointment in motherhood. For each of the women, shame and judgment is everywhere, but there’s strength in numbers.

We follow the group’s friendships as their kids grow older, meeting them again as they hang out and let loose, watch their kids at the playground and at sports matches, attend a White Sunday service, and hit important milestones. Each of these scenes are gorgeous vignettes in their own right, but they also chart mounting tensions between Joy and Finau, whose experiences and expectations of life, and motherhood, diverge sharply.

Staging, throughout, is simple and effective, working with a tapa cloth and five chairs, as well as sympathetic sound and lighting to demarcate space and tone. I find the opening meeting quite static, perhaps exacerbated by the small size of the stage, but once people are up on their feet, and moving through time, the energy ramps up. The work’s most poignant moment uses theatrical space to carefully illustrate the rupture in Finau and Joy’s relationship, physically separating and isolating them. They share their deepest midnight secrets, emotions barely contained. Their friends can’t repair this breach, even while they tend to each woman. But the play shows that the door is always open, if people are willing to walk through, be vulnerable, and work to repair that bond. We end with the gift of dance, the reiteration of culture and heritage, and intergenerational acts and declarations of love.

Love; Mum is a terrific show overall: funny, sad, moving, incisive, joyful, vulnerable, generous. At times the performances are visceral; it’s a good thing we’re handed tissues on the way in, and people might want to take note of the content advisory about family violence. It joins a growing body of work, across multiple art forms, that demands that we take mothers, and the complexity of motherhood, seriously. It foregrounds the voices of Pacific women, in a country and arts space where narratives about women are still often posed as marginal, and even those available remain pretty white. It reminds us of the loving and often hard work it takes to tend to relationships, and the need for compassion for ourselves and others.

The play had a development showing last December, but I’d love to see this work given a bit of resourcing to further its life, with a view to a tour or festival development, as the story of these women, and their sisterhood, deserves to be shared.

Love; Mum runs until 9 February – but is already sold out!