Review: Gush, Traverse Theatre

On arrival at the Traverse Theatre, the audience finds a bare white stage graced by what looks very like a wainscoted rectangular trough full of flesh-coloured pillows. It’s domestic, yet at the same time something unfamiliar. This is an intriguing start, and a design which unveils some pleasing surprises as the show unfolds. 

Gush has a lot to recommend it: a truly compelling one-woman performance by Jessica Hardwick, no doubt owing a lot to direction by Becky Hope-Palmer, deft design work by Becky Minto, Renny Robertson and Niroshini Thambar which transforms that bare white stage into a fully realised world through set, light, and sound. Writing by Jess Brodie is deliciously alive, packed with incisive details that bloom into a rich picture of who Ally (Hardwick) is. 

Ally is on the brink of motherhood and desperate for a single, defining act of self-exploration before the doors shut forever and she must forever sublimate her own life to that of her desperately wanted child. Brodie’s script is really rich, describing desire so overpowering that one character is “too bright to look at, like the sun”; the memory of her mum shut in the bathroom for hours, so sick with rage and jealousy at Ally’s childhood wish to spend time out of the house with other friends that she ends up missing the times Ally is actually present. And all Ally can do in the face of this is learn how to lie, a habit which is returning now that she is on the brink of motherhood herself. 

At its heart, the play asks whether selflessness is the ideal condition for motherhood, and if so, whether one single act of ‘selfishness’ is going to be enough to carry a mother through an entire lifetime of selflessness ever after. It opens the idea, but could explore more; that the ‘selfless’ martyrs of this world often demand an unreasonable return of the people around them; explore intergenerational dynamics.

I was a little puzzled by the “once a mother, always and only a mother” implication: is there no third-wave feminism to be found amongst the pink cushions? More specifically relevant to Ally’s soul-searching quest, identity crises and their resolutions don’t have to stop with pregnancy. Why not take up painting? Learn to skydive? Finally redo that A-level physics course? You can, in fact, be things other than a parent sometimes. Gush could delve deeper here.

There is so much to love about Gush. But this feels like a play which has lost its second act: themes are introduced which would benefit from more fully rounding out, from a more thorough exploration of the tensions arising not only from the moment of pregnancy and birth, but through the transition into motherhood and identity consolidation thereafter. Brodie’s writing is so enjoyable, and Hardwick’s performance so lovely to watch, that given a bigger canvas I’m sure the audience would enjoy discovering how they choose to fill it. In the performance I watched, there was a little hesitation in the audience’s applause as the lights faded to black; a sense of ‘Is that it, then?’ which tells me that I wasn’t the only one left wanting more.

Writer: Jess Brodie
Director: Becky Hope-Palmer
Designer: Becky Minto
Lighting Designer: Renny Robertson
Composer & Sound Designer: Niroshini Thambar
Company Stage Manager: Lee Davis

Gush plays at the Traverse Theatre until Saturday 25 April.