Motherhood

Elli Mackenzie brings her autobiographical play Motherhood to the Joseph Rowntree Theatre on Sunday 8 November. It's a solo show staged through her company, Oddsocks Productions, and it does exactly what the title says: it looks at the joys, the challenges and the absurdities of raising children while running a family business.

It's a personal one. Mackenzie is a professional actress, and the story comes from her own life, so it's less a scripted drama and more a first-hand account of the messy, joyful reality of motherhood. The narrative makes room for an orangutan and a giant woodlouse, and it doesn't shy away from the contradictions of the experience — the parts that are heartwarming and the parts that are just plain ridiculous.

Motherhood premiered at the Jersey Arts Centre in January, and it's the kind of show that lingers. After the curtain went down there, audiences stuck around to chat about their own experiences, and the reactions were pretty visceral: one described it as 'a sucker punch to the feels', another called it 'bloody brilliant', and a third called it 'breathtakingly vivid'. It's a one-woman show, so the whole thing rests on Mackenzie's performance.

Practically, it runs for 75 minutes with no interval, so you're in and out in a single stretch. It's at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre on 8 November, a single date in York.