Lizzy Watts portrays the struggle of motherhood with sharp wit and biting humour bringing Jane Upton’s terrific script to life.
Motherhood: a life-altering shift that is rarely as glamorous as we once imagined.
The reality can be relentless—feeling trapped, unsexy, and a million miles away from the dreams we once chased.
Jane Upton’s script distills these raw, unfiltered emotions into something sharp, glittering, and brutally honest.
Like a finely cut diamond, it is hard in the right places, sparkling in others.
The language is crafted with precision—oxymoronic without being indulgent, poetic without losing its bite. There’s a touch of the Russell Brand wordsmith in it, an alchemy of wit and grit that slices through the romanticized notions of motherhood and polishes them into something both cutting and beautiful.
“Why do we explode our lives for another?”
The play captures the exhaustion, the depression, the constant struggle of coping with the less celebrated aspects of being a mother.
Yet, it does so in a way that is bitingly funny. One standout scene sees the protagonist confronted by a man from her past—someone she once slept with in a field. “I was your boyfriend,” he claims. “No,” she corrects him, “we f**ked on a field.” The line is delivered by the protagonist slicing through any shroud of romanticism.
The set is minimal allowing the protagonist to take centre stage. Lizzy Watts delivers a terrific performance as a writer wrestling with trying to further her career whilst battling with being a mother.
Can you truly pursue your artistic ambitions once you have children? Is that dream—the New York penthouse, the wildly funny script—forever out of reach? It speaks to the gnawing feeling of not being good enough, of watching ambitions slip away in the treadmill of childcare and domesticity.
And then, there’s sex. The play doesn’t shy away from the downside of intimacy post-motherhood—the loss of spontaneity, the shift in purpose. Men, the script suggests, often use sex to feel loved. But for mothers, it’s another demand, another obligation, another piece of themselves they are expected to give away.
This is not a sugar-coated take on motherhood, nor is it a self-pitying lament. It is raw, real, and refreshingly unsentimental—yet packed with humour that makes even the darkest observations land with a punch. Jane’s script cuts, grinds, and polishes, leaving the audience with something rare: a play that doesn’t just entertain but resonates after the final line.
The Woman is playing at the Royal & Derngate until Saturday 15th February.