The Paupers Pit is bathed in red light, and a pianist is playing, welcoming us to the venue in a strong Russian accent. We’re in the most notorious nightclub in Petrograd, the Former Persons Club, where everyone’s an outsider; the glamourous Diana Demidova soon sweeps on to perform in cabaret. But something’s not quite right, as the pianist suggests to Diana that she’s not really singing in Russian. A lighting change later we’re with Diana and Leon – patients in a mental hospital which is scheduled to close, with its patients moved to care in the community.
The title Hidden Mother refers to the early days of photography, when people had to sit still for an age (190 years, says Leon, perhaps misspoken but funny) while the negative formed. To encourage babies to relax, the mother would disguise herself as the furniture or backdrop, before removing herself from the child without their noticing. It’s a clever metaphor for the abandoning of refuge and maternal safety, as Diana and Leon face up to – or don’t face up to – the seismic changes ahead of them. They have very different attitudes; despite her fear (and resorting to fantasy about a past related to the Romanovs) Diana is determined to survive, whereas Leon is decidedly downbeat, pessimistic, and rooted in realism.
The play focusses on Diana. Actor Laura Louise Baker dominates the stage, comfortably switching between her moods and personas, equally at home as the fabulous cabaret singer and the nervous and fragile former mental patient. Diana’s character is given depth as we discover more about her current situation, and her complex relationship with a mother who she both closely identifies with – she adopts her mother’s family stories as her own history – and resents for her coldness and absence.
In contrast, the character of Leon played by Polis Loizou is underdeveloped. There are hints of a past as an activist, now beaten into submission by disappointment and failure. But his trajectory seems all too obvious from the opening scenes, and because we never learn to care for him in the same way that Diana appears to, there is an emotional hole in the play.
Still, Loizou’s script and the show’s production techniques neatly layer the levels of alienation that Diana experiences. Diana’s confidence, and even the pronunciation of her name, varies depending on the situation – she’s Deanna the Russian chanteuse to Leon, Diana to everyone else. The lighting changes, and the use of interrogatory or smugly complacent disembodied recordings to represent support workers on the phone, highlight her lack of connection to anyone except Leon.
The Off-Off-Off-Broadway Company have always brought intriguing stories to Buxton, and had deserved success in the past with Peaceful and Back Door. In Hidden Mother, Diana’s use of fantasy and madness to make sense of her fears and to survive is reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s iconic feminist text The Yellow Wallpaper – which is high praise indeed. Given the intelligence of the script and the warmth and power of Laura Louise Baker’s performance, this play is not far from excellence. But it needs to do more to make us care.