Fast Show star Arabella Weir plays Brighton’s Komedia
She plays Brighton’s Komedia on March 11, following huge success with the show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2019. Arabella is promising the mother of all confessional shows, and it is all true, she stresses. She will be recounting stories from her dysfunctional childhood and life as a single working mother in a show which explores all the pain, pitfalls, embarrassment and unintentional hilarity of motherhood.
The title harks back to her international bestseller Does My Bum Look Big in This? which in turn took its title from her Fast Show catchphrase: “I am trying to be modest about the show and not be modest about the show,” says Arabella. “But it was very successful and sold out. We had to put on extra shows, and it was all very exciting and energising.”
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Hide AdAs for why it went so well, she’d rather not ponder: “My parents were Scottish, and if I let myself, I could come up with a million reasons why it went so well that had absolutely nothing to do with me, that people thought I was somebody else, that it was all a mistake…. So I try not to analyse.” Suffice to say, it was the perfect springboard for the tour.
“I realised when I wrote Does My Bum Look Big in This? that my mother’s desperation for me to be thin shaped so much. I knew I wanted to do a solo show, which is something I have never done before. I am not going to go and tell topical jokes. That is not what I do. So I thought I would go back and tell stories from my phenomenally and hilariously dysfunctional childhood. In the show I will talk about my mother, the arc of the show being that when you are a neglected child and you think you have a really bad mum, when you have your own children, you realise what a hard job it is.
“But I still think my mother was a really bad mother.”
A spectacular, dazzling, intelligent, flamboyant, remarkable woman… but an awful mum.: “She was neglectful and unpleasant and undermining and critical. She very much wanted to be a mother. She just didn’t realise that a lot of being a mother is a phenomenal amount of drudgery, that it involved things like feeding people regularly. You and I can decide that we are not going to eat tonight, but my mother was neglectful. She was completely ill-equipped to deal with the needs of a child.
“I think part of the problem was that she knew she was failing, but a lot of the time she didn’t care. I don’t feel angry at all about it now. I have had a lot of therapy and I have written lots of comedy about it. My mother didn’t choose to be that way. She was a badly neglected child herself. But she just didn’t realise that a lot of parenting comes down to grindingly hard and regular work. She just thought ‘Why is anybody bothering with that?’ But she was an amazing woman. All my friends adored her. I tell stories in the show in which she comes across incredibly well, but just not as a mother. She had phenomenal intelligence and incredible courage, but a mother she was not.”
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Hide AdArabella is delighted to think she has been able to capture both sides. A friend saw the show and said: ‘I would have loved to meet her, but I definitely wouldn’t have wanted her as my mother!’
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