• Home
  • Current Projects
  • About
  • Productions
  • impel theatre
  • Writing
  • Teaching & Workshops
  • Press
  • Blog
  • Blog Archive
Menu

Kendra Jones

director . writer . dramaturg . instructor
  • Home
  • Current Projects
  • About
  • Productions
  • impel theatre
  • Writing
  • Teaching & Workshops
  • Press
  • Blog
  • Blog Archive

impel theatre blog

Burgeoning academic.
Creator of things to read & experience. Thinks too much.
Analyzes everything. 

Reviews are meant to catalogue, interrogate, and challenge what I see.

All opinions are just that -- opinions. 

Pip Dwyer, Kaitlin Race, Jennifer Dysart McEwan in Watching Glory Die by Judith Thompson, directed by Kendra JonesPhoto by John Gundy

Pip Dwyer, Kaitlin Race, Jennifer Dysart McEwan in Watching Glory Die by Judith Thompson, directed by Kendra Jones

Photo by John Gundy


Sunny days ☀️
Happy Mother’s Day, Canadians 

#anarchyintheuk
Tangled.

Found in Commercial Street.
#london #spitalfields #streetart
Happy birthday @bonks21 ! If these pictures don’t exemplify our relationship, nothing does. Here’s to this summer’s European adventure which trades Scottish mountains for Parisian staircases.
❤️

Found in High Holborn, London
Just hanging out. 

Found in Commercial Street. 

#london #eastlondon #wheatpaste #streetart
Outside David Garrick’s house, on the banks of the Thames; his Temple to Shakespeare.

#hampton #temple #shakespeare
Saw Hate Radio at @batterseaartscentre - thought some things. You can read them on the blog, link in bio.

#theatre #archive #review #milorau #bac
Saw Book of Mormon the other week. Thought some things. You can read them on the blog- link in bio

📸: Prince of Wales Theatre ceiling
Our appetite and capacity to digest fragmented narrative is expanding.

@jordan.tannahill - Theatre of the Unimpressed 

#reading #theatre #mediums #mediation #experiences

tweets

  • RT @culturewitch: Welp that’s my first 6 months in a senior leadership role done. I’m still at the beginning of my journey but here’s… https://t.co/iIfgdPHU78
    Jul 14, 2022, 3:22 AM
  • Peak content https://t.co/OgxdUC6kQo
    Jul 13, 2022, 3:32 AM
  • RT @thistimcrouch: This. https://t.co/tYbCTUzSXN
    Jul 5, 2022, 2:39 AM
  • Hey team; saw a badger romping down the side of the road today. Shouted with excitement. @JohnNormanMusic was drivi… https://t.co/uA2tuMBmAd
    Jun 30, 2022, 6:19 PM

My Mother's Funeral @ The Yard Theatre

February 12, 2025

My Mother’s Funeral is a play about grief, but moreso it is a play about class, particularly about the relationships ambitious young people from working class backgrounds have with their families, and with the middle class environments they find themselves in. Abigail is a young playwright whose mother has just died; a working class woman who raised her two children on benefits, her mum did not have any money to leave her, so Abigail is faced with the financial burden of a funeral and the social burden of her feelings of inadequacy around her inability to provide one, and the anxiety around a council funded funeral and the lack of dignity that may hold. She chooses to cave, to make the art that is demanded of her as a working class artist — poverty porn — to hopefully earn the money to pay for her mother’s funeral. 

The play weaves between spaces and times in a really clever way, with the 3 actors shifting between characters. With only 3 actors a host of places, times, and characters are shown, and the structure mirrors the overlapping worlds Abigail is facing, as she unsuccessfully attempts to simultaneously sell her personal story, but keep her personal life and the shame she feels about it separated. What really struck me (as an artist from a working class background) was the explorations around love — what does it mean to love your children and express that love when money isn’t an option? One scene in particular was stark in its criticism of both the middle class inability to understand love without finances, and the working class inability to fund love. The friction between these two points of view was present and really thoughtfully articulated through Abigail’s struggle. It is refreshing to see such an honest examination of the working class experience, and in particular the experience of the children of working class parents entering middle class spaces, where despite their intelligence and passion, they will always feel like outsiders. 

The staging is simple yet layered, using the play about a play within a play (how meta) to create additional meaning in the spaces and relationships of objects. Simple moments are both hyper real and clearly theatricalised. At times the performances are a bit shouty where they would benefit from nuance, but overall the pacing and staging were very good as were the performances — in particular the physical work of the performers. 

Tags: new writing, Paines Plough, Yard Theatre, working class, Political Theatre, Review
← When The World Turns @ Southbank CentreSmall Forward - Belarus Free Theatre @ Barbican Pit →
Back to Top