Fringe Firsts: Anna Morris accepts her award for Son of a Bitch
Fringe Firsts: Anna Morris accepts her award for Son of a Bitch
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00:00Now, there is a toxic patriarch also in the next play, which is a superb piece of writing
00:14and performance by Anna Morris, possibly best known for her comedy, but now writing and
00:20performing a fantastic show, which is fundamentally, I think, about the ambiguity of motherhood
00:27and about the pressures that women still face to tick that box, to become mothers, often
00:33without really thinking through whether it is the right thing for them.
00:39In Son of a Bitch, our heroine, and it is a solo show beautifully presented in the demonstration
00:44room at Summer Hall, our heroine, Marnie, has a child who is about four and a husband
00:54who has quite a high-powered job, and finds herself on a plane, not sitting next to her
01:00husband because he's been upgraded, but with this fractious child on a long, long flight,
01:09and something happens.
01:12She drinks a few bottles of wine because she's a nervous, little bottles I mean, because
01:17she's a nervous flyer, and she snaps, and during a kind of incident in the aisle, she
01:22shouts something unforgivable at her little boy.
01:25She calls him all kinds of names, tells him to basically F off, and calls him the C word,
01:32which of course is a dreadful thing, and unfortunately, someone on the plane films this, and it goes
01:38viral on social media.
01:40So Marnie becomes the most hated woman and the worst mother on the planet, briefly.
01:45Her life falls apart, and of course, during that whole process, she has reason to reflect
01:51on how she got there, how she ended up living a life that she was never sure she wanted,
01:58and hurting the person she loves most, her little boy.
02:02It's a magnificent piece of writing, it's a simple story arc, but it's absolutely perfectly
02:08executed, all the language, all the characters that are evoked contribute just perfectly
02:15to the tale that's told.
02:17So please come up, Anna Morris, and accept your Fringe First Award for Son of a Bitch,
02:23with your director Madeleine, if she's here, that's wonderful, thank you, Madeleine Morris.
02:27First of all, I just want to thank Summer Hall for taking a chance on the show, I emailed
02:51them in January, cutting it fine, slightly, and they got back to me and wanted to have
02:56a chat about it, and they'd actually read the play, which is amazing, because some venues
03:00don't, and they offered me the slot.
03:02I didn't have a producer or a director, so I started asking around, and I was very lucky
03:07to find Madeleine Moore, who's an amazing director, who's also part of the Thelmas,
03:11an incredible production company, so Madeleine and Gulorana, who's here, and in association
03:16with Josie Underwood, took on the show, and it was a bit of a scrabble to get there.
03:20I had several breakdowns during the rehearsal process.
03:23In the middle of the rehearsal process, I said to my director, this show is a f***ing
03:27nightmare.
03:28There's 20 characters, it's ridiculous, and she was like, you wrote this?
03:32Hi, I'm the one to blame.
03:36I just want to say thanks to my dramaturg, Dave Jackson, who went through it with a big
03:39red pen, and was very brutal, but it worked, and also to the lighting and the sound designers,
03:46the whole team have just been incredible, and I also just wanted to say, this is my
03:51seventh solo show at the Edinburgh Fringe, I did six in the comedy section, I'm so glad
03:55I moved to the theatre section.
03:59I took a risk, I'm 44, I don't have children, this is my baby.
04:07I didn't have the choice to have children, so this play came from a place of dealing
04:13with that, so I can do this play and use the C word without worrying about damaging a child,
04:18which is great.
04:20And as a childless cat lady, a very proud one, I'm very happy to accept this, and also
04:26as a 44-year-old woman, who's not had many auditions recently and has felt a bit invisible,
04:31I thought, f*** it, I'm going to write it myself.
04:33So I did.
04:37Perfect.