Review: Nurture, The Hope Theatre
Write Club Festival 2025
Mother issues loom large in this interesting thriller, but it requires more nurturing to ensure it grows up big and strong. Summary
Rating
Good
When a young boy is murdered, it sets off a series of events that leaves three people all having to address both mother issues and the inner trauma from their childhoods. There’s a mother who doesn’t grieve in the way society expects, a journalist who has clearly never dealt with the suicide of his own mother when he was young, and finally, the murderer, whose mother never showed him any real love until she was on her deathbed.
It’s an interesting set up and one that you assume wants to explore the classic question of nature verses nurture in our upbringing and how childhood trauma can last long into adulthood. However, as fascinating as those central concepts are, they are never properly realised. But that’s more than forgivable for a show playing as part of The Hope Theatre’s Write Club Festival, the perfect place to really test out new works. If you can’t take a few risks with new work here, then where can you?
The real problem with this piece is in trying to decide quite whose story this is meant to be, as all three are given equal stage time. This means none really takes ownership, leaving the whole slightly ungrounded as we struggle to connect. It also results in a strange coldness in our feelings towards a dead child and what should be a grieving mother.
If the play is going to be further developed, it perhaps could be set around Sam Stafford’s murderer. His matter of fact approach and sheer casualness in justifying what he has done is gloriously chilling, and results in slightly nervous laughter from the audience. Of the three characters, he feels the most complete, as if writer/director Jacob Ethan Tanner started with this one character and so was able to fully flesh him out. The writing is such that it causes us to initially laugh with him, before we realise our mistake and try to pretend we weren’t rooting for him in any way.
The same cannot be said about the mother or journalist. Whilst both actors do their best with what’s provided, both characters lack enough depth to make them satisfactory or give us a reason to care for them. Gabi Martinez’s mother drops tantalising hints of something more when she fails to grieve in the way expected of a mother whose son has been brutally murdered, yet this never seems to come to anything. Miles Henderson’s journalist is even more frustrating and never really justifies his stage time other than as a conduit to tie together mother and murderer. There’s an attempt to demonstrate his own unresolved mother issues as we witness him at a therapy session, but this just feels shoehorned in to fill out his backstory.
Outside of the script there are other lessons to be learnt. Having an actor use his hand to represent a phone is just lazy, especially when the other person on the call is holding a mobile phone! It’s a minor thing but these little details can be an annoyance. Sightlines are another bugbear. Even in a small venue such as The Hope Theatre, having actors sit on the floor for long periods can mean they become invisible to parts of the audience.
Nurture certainly holds plenty of promise. The intertwining of the three characters, all with their unresolved mother issues, is well worked. It means the production as child is certainly there, it just needs to be further nurtured to fulfil its promise as it grows into adulthood.
Written and directed by: Jacob Ethan Tanner
Assistant director: Issie Riley
Produced by: Jacob Ethan Tanner and Issie Riley
Nurture has completed its current run at The Hope Theatre as part of Write Club Festival.