My Mother Said I Never Should GCSE

Charlotte Keatley's seminal play, My Mother Said I Never Should, is published here as a GCSE Student Edition, which features the play text alongside accompanying commentary and notes which consider the play's themes, context, characters, dramatic style and critical reception.

Following the story of four generations of women - a great-grand-daughter a daughter, a mother and a grandmother -My Mother Said I Never Should grapples with social forces that threaten to split them apart as the twentieth century wears on. The play sets the enormous social changes of the twentieth century against the desire to love and to be loved.

The play premiered in 1987 at the Contact theatre in Manchester and was subsequently presented in 1989 at the Royal Court Theatre in London. It has been translated into twenty-two languages and is performed across the world. In 2000 it was chosen by the Royal National Theatre as one of the hundred Significant Plays of the Twentieth Century.

Charlotte Keatley is best-known for her play My Mother Said I Never Should, which has been named by the National Theatre as one of The Significant Plays of the Twentieth Century. More recently, Charlotte Keatley's playOur Father premiered at the Watford Palace Theatre. She has written for radio, television and film, and has won the George Devine Award, Manchester Evening News Best New Play Award, a Time Out Award, and was nominated for an Olivier Award as Most Promising Newcomer.

Sophie Bush is a Lecturer in Performance at Sheffield Hallam University and has previously taught at the Universities of Sheffield, Huddersfield and Manchester Metropolitan. Her research and teaching interests lie in the history, practice and politics of contemporary British Theatre. Her doctorate, on the work of Timberlake Wertenbaker, was awarded by the University of Sheffield in 2011, and in September 2013, her first bookThe Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker was published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama; she is also the author of My Mother Said I Never Should GCSE Student Guide (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016). She maintains an involvement with practical theatre-making, as director and devisor.