Play: The Best Thing

““It’s like being inside Darth Vader’s mask,” says Rachael Savage, 42, the founder of Vamos Theatre, Britain’s leading full-mask theatre company. “You can hear yourself breathe, yet you can see little and have no peripheral vision.”

The immobile features of the mask somehow become emotionally engaging on stage. Savage explains: “Pace, posture, gesture and angle of the mask all have to express visually what isn’t spoken. As a performer, you are anonymous. It’s not a genre for actors with egos.”

At the end of this month, Vamos Theatre’s latest production, The Best Thing,begins a 72-date tour around the country, starting with the 2016 London International Mime Festival. The play was triggered by an article I wrote in theObserver magazine three years ago about the plight of unmarried mothers in the 1950s and 1960s, forced to give their children up for adoption. Britain might have been “swinging” with the arrival of pop music, the sexual revolution and women’s liberation, but a traditional moral code still applied for the girl who got herself “into trouble”.

“We still call women sluts and slags but where’s the equivalent for men?” asks Jean Robertson-Molloy, 79, a retired social worker. She travelled with me to Worcester from London to see the play in its final stages of rehearsal. In 1963, when she was in her twenties, she put her daughter, Amanda, up for adoption. Jean went on to marry and have two more children. In 1991, she traced Amanda. “People talk about a reunion,” Jean tells Rachael, “but it’s really a first meeting.”

Amanda, married with children, came to England in 2010 from her home in Australia for a brief visit, but the two – at Amanda’s request – have had little contact since. “Nowadays, birth without marriage is the norm but then it wasn’t easy,” says Jean. “No childcare and nobody to help. But still people say, ‘How could you give your child away?’ ”

In 1968, the peak year for adoption, 16,164 children of unmarried mothers were adopted. Half a Million Women, an analysis that was published by the Post Adoption Centre in 1992, describes how unmarried mothers who fought to keep their children were seen as “emotionally disturbed” and a “discredited person”.

The Best Thing is the culmination of two years of research conducted by Rachael, working in collaboration with the production’s composer and script consultant, Janie Amour. “The title of the play comes from what many women were told when adoption was pressed on them,” says Rachael. “So many were advised: ‘It’s the best thing for the baby. It’s the best thing for you; sign here.’ ”

Mime peels back mask of 60s forced adoption [The Guardian 1/16/6 by Yvonne Roberts]

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