“I am the mother,” roars Frauke Requardt – staring down at the two men who are crouched at her feet, wailing like toddlers. But if Requardt opens her new work as a towering embodiment of maternal authority, only seconds pass before all that power leaks away.
Slumped with exhaustion, she starts wailing too. Those inevitable moments of collapse will be familiar to anyone with small children and, at its best, Mothers offers an uncanny, and inventive mood diary of the world of early parenting.
Neil Callaghan and Jacob Ingram-Dodd make an excellent stab at transforming themselves into Requardt’s small boys. Unabashedly naked for half the show, they flip from giggling angels to marauding monsters. At deliriously odd moments they dress up as giant toadstools, perfectly capturing the alien strangeness of tiny children when they’re lost in a fantasy – or absorbed in disgustingly ceremonious games with pee and poo. As their mother Requardt is either the comically bashed intermediary in fights, or the tender dispenser of cuddles, gathering the boys up in an exquisitely entwined trio.
There are structural problems with Mothers that make it less than Requardt’s best work: it shuffles through its ideas in too predictably sequential a rhythm; our relationship with the material doesn’t noticeably deepen or change. The closing image, where the dancers slide across a water-flooded stage, is shop-worn. But much of it still bears the hallmarks of Requardt’s singular imagination, and there are moments that are as beautifully offbeat as they are true.
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At Quarterhouse, Folkestone, 15 June. Box office: 01303 760750. And touring.
