The mother lode
Writer and cartoonist Tom Scott has turned his mother’s tumultuous life into a humorous, insightful play, writes Sarah Catherall.
“Oh for s...’s sake, it goes without saying,” Joan Scott declared when her son, Tom, asked her if she loved him.
To the feisty, sharp-tongued Irish mother of six children, love was much more than a word. Raising her children in the Manawatū in the 1950s and 60s meant hard physical work, putting food on the table on little or no money and washing clothes in a copper pot. Meanwhile, her husband was usually drunk, shut off from the family in an alcoholic haze.
The writer and internationally renowned cartoonist Tom Scott has penned a play about his mother, simply titled Joan. Rehearsing for the role at Wellington’s Circa Theatre, actress Ginette McDonald swings into the role with ease, probably because she knew Joan so well.
It was thanks to McDonald – or Nettie, as Scott calls her – that he wrote the play about his mother in the first place. The seasoned actress, most famous for her 1980s alter ego television role as Lyn of Tawa, spent many years with the Scott family, and often impersonated Joan for family and friends. McDonald always said that Scott should write a script about his mother. After Joan passed away in 2011 at the age of 88, Scott says the time felt right.
Joan follows an award-winning, semiautobiographical play that Scott wrote recently about his father, a sell-out here and across the Tasman. Staged 15 years ago, the material for Daylight
Athiest was gripping: a story about an alcoholic father of six children, an Irish Protestant who knocked up a Catholic girl.