Dead Mum

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https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2025/dead-mum

Date Reviewed: 02/10/2025

The title Dead Mum could be enough to scare some people off. Who wants to spend an hour sitting in a room being reminded of death? But here I am, with my daughter, walking into the Explosives Factory in St Kilda, a space once used to manufacture fireworks, now reimagined as an intimate 60-seat performance venue.

The musicians are already playing, creating a cabaret warmth as we enter. They will later be introduced by writer/performer Jack Francis West, as the “beautiful band of funeral directors”: Riley (guitar), Lucy (cello), Tyke (keyboard) and Eve (drums). “I’ll be playing the victim,” Jack will later say.

For the moment, however, he is content to mingle before the performance. He quietly sits next to us. We snap a few selfies before the play begins. “Is that you in the photo?” I ask pointing to a large photo of Jack as a young boy and his mum onstage. He nods. “My mother got kicked by a horse and died,” he says. Pause. “No, just joking.”

Jokes like this could fall flat, but they don’t. In fact, they land with surprising force. Part of it is the room: the audience feels as though they already know him. Friends and acquaintances have come to cheer Jack on.

The intimacy of the venue amplifies the laughter, and suddenly we’re all there, at Jack’s mum’s funeral.

That’s the gamble of confessional theatre — the performer working through trauma onstage in real time.

The show veers wildly between hilarious camp (fried chicken, glitter, show tunes, even labubu) and gut-punch tragedy (his mother’s cancer, an abusive relationship, the loneliness of grief at 19). The shifts are sometimes jarring, but that’s part of the design.

The saturation of themes can overwhelm. There’s grief, sex, trauma, vomit, love, addiction, even a dream sequence about fatherhood. Not all of it lands equally. A little pruning would give more space for the strongest moments to breathe.

But West’s artistic thesis is clear. He isn’t just telling sad stories. He’s using comedy and song to earn tragedy, to make space for grief without wallowing. “It doesn’t matter if I, personally, am having an emotional breakthrough on stage,” he’s said in an interview with Theatre Works. “Just speaking the words, telling the story, bringing light to what is usually kept in the darkness — it’s like a spell.”

The spell works. By the end, the audience is leaning in, sometimes singing along, laughing harder than they expected, even tearing up a little. People bring their own grief into the room and leave a little lighter, as if the show has carried some of it for them. That’s powerful.

We walk in wary, but walk out wondering about death and meaning.

“What would you do if I suddenly died?” I ask my daughter as we leave. “Would you miss me?”

She thinks. “I’d say, you’ve actually never been lighter. Cremation does wonders for the figure,” she says, paraphrasing Jack’s own line from the play.

Highlights

• The interactive components with the audience
• Cabaret atmosphere with live musicians to create warmth and elevate the confessions.
  
• Music numbers and parody with everything from Wicked to camp cabaret
  
• The disarming honesty of the work.
  
• Anyone touched by grief, especially if they have lost a mum
  
• Fringe audiences who like experimental theatre
  
• Theatregoers who would like to watch this with their mums (or vice versa)

Who is it for?

• Anyone touched by grief, especially if they have lost a mum
  
• Fringe audiences who like experimental theatre
  
• Theatregoers who would like to watch this with their mums (or vice versa)

Dead Mum is performed nightly at the TW Explosives Factory at St Kilda until 4th October.

Reviewed by Mary Sinanidis