Mixed Race Studies

Playwright Sarah Rutherford on her play Adult Supervision

TheatreVOICE
Department of Theatre & Performance
Victoria and Albert Museum
2013-10-22

Heather Neill

Interview: Sarah Rutherford

The playwright talks to Heather Neill about her new drama, Adult Supervision, a story about race which is currently playing at the Park Theatre in London’s Finsbury Park in Jez Bond’s production. Recorded at the Park Theatre, 16 October 2013.

Listen to the interview here.

Review of Adult Supervision at Park Theatre Finsbury Park

LondonTheater1.com
London
2013-10-20

Alan Franks, Senior Reviewer

Adult supervision, if you remember, is what Barack Obama said Washington needed. This was back in 2006, two years before his election as forty-fourth president of the US, and the first black incumbent of the office. So there could hardly be a more timely moment than now for a play bearing his words as its title, with America once more squeezing through one of its congressional crises which baffle the world with their apparent childishness.

What’s more, Sarah Rutherford’s play is set on that giddy evening five years ago when the votes were counted, the unthinkable happened and a black American family prepared to move into the White House. So the joyful political liberation plays out as a running backdrop to the get-together of the four youngish women on whom we are here to eavesdrop. More a frontdrop actually, since the TV is situated on the fourth wall, which means they gawp and whoop at us as the results of the count come in. It is as if we are making our own fleeting guest appearances at the unfolding drama.

Our hostess is the controlling Natasha, lawyer turned full-time mother who loses no opportunity for trumpeting the moral virtue of her career shift. Her children are a statement in their own right; she is white and they are black, the fruits of an adoption mission to Ethiopia. One of her guests is the angry Mo, whose husband is black; another is Issy, Natasha’s supposed best friend; the third, and only black woman is the heavily pregnant Angela. In Natasha’s patronising, or matronising vision, the four of them are bonded by their commitment to mixed-race progeny…

Read the review here.

Playwright Sarah Rutherford: ‘Middle-class, mixed-race families are invisible on our stages’

What’s on Stage
London
2013-10-10

Editorial Staff

As her new play Adult Supervision premieres at the Park Theatre, playwright Sarah Rutherford discusses multiculturalism in modern Britain

What’s Adult Supervision about?

It’s set in 2008 and it’s about a white ex-lawyer, Natasha, who’s adopted two children from Ethiopia. As a parent who likes to do things by the book, she’s decided that it’s important for the kids to get to know the handful of other ‘children of colour’ at their very smart private school. Natasha seizes on the opportunity of the US election to invite the mothers of these children to a drinks party, but things start to go awry as the Obamatinis flow and inhibitions are shed.

Why did you set it on the night of Obama’s election?

I have such vivid memories of that night, and although it was historic for everyone, I think many communities—‘parents of children of colour’ being one—took it as a kind of personal victory. It was an incredibly heady moment—suddenly anything seemed possible—and it’s an interesting time to look back on from the perspective of today, when the US seems to be going into meltdown and November 2008 looks like an almost innocent time.

Would you describe it as a comedy?

Yes—a comedy drama. But the laughs in it come mostly from character, from truth (truths you may not have heard spoken out loud before) and from discomfort, rather than from gags.

How has your personal experience influenced and shaped the play?

Hugely. I’m married to a man of Jamaican origin and am the mother of two amazing mixed-race children, although they go to a much more diverse school than the one in the play. Some of the more jaw-dropping dialogue in the play is actually pretty much verbatim stuff that has been said to me over the years; other material has come from things that I’ve thought or sensed but that have gone unsaid…

Read the entire interview here.