Smother

A story is being told on several storeys in a tall, skinny house in King's Cross. It is about motherhood and has been devised by Sarah Cole and parents at the Coram young parents project in Camden. An audience (of one or two) is escorted to this run-down address and left for half an hour to climb up and down uncarpeted stairs where three young mothers are repeatedly passed. The piece involves all the props of motherhood but lacks the most important players: children. One mother skates on icy blue linoleum. Another lights a blaze in a grate. A third showers on the top floor. The mothers make no eye contact. It is a wistful, angry, vivid piece about motherhood as loss of freedom, as isolation, as house arrest. But the irony is that if real flesh and blood children were involved, there would be no time to stare out of a dirty window on to King's Cross. Reverie is a luxury.