Sophie Maybury’s Harper and Sean Cameron’s Andy dancing in condiment costumes in My Mad Mum. Pictures: James Drury
CONSIDER this statistic: 3.7 million under-18s in the United Kingdom have a parent who struggles with a mental illness. That’s one in three children in every UK classroom.
For too many of them, it feels like a secret they have to carry alone, hence their plight is invisible: hidden in plain sight, leaving them to deal with unique challenges at school and at home.
Our Time Charity, the only British charity dedicated to improving the outcomes for children growing up in these circumstances, has teamed up with York community arts collective Next Door But One for a second time, following up 2025’s How To Be A Kid with a schools tour of Ant Stones’ two-hander My Mad Mum, topped off by two public 5.30pm performances at York Explore.
Sophie Maybury’s new teacher, Miss Knowles, and Sean Cameron’s “scary” head of behaviour, Mr Fletcher, in My Mad Mum
The school shows, which began last week for 3,000 York and North Yorkshire secondary pupils, are ccompanied by discussions on the subject of mental health, identity and being a young carer for a parent.
Next Door But One specialises in raising awareness of often unspoken topics, a brief encapsulated in My Mad Mum, Stones’s deeply affecting story of GCSE pupil Andy (Sean Cameron) and Harper (fellow Leeds Conservatoire graduate Sophie Maybury), the new girl at school.
Billed as a “fast-paced, fun and fearless collision of real friendships, messy families and surviving the stuff no-one warns you about as a teenager”, this hour-long drama serves up their conversations with direct-address frankness, yet both pupils are cramped by a carapace of self-protection.
My Mad Mum director Kate Veysey, left, in the rehearsal room with assistant director dramaturg Matthew Harper-Hardcastle and company manager Jane Williamson
Andy is already the subject of “looks, whispers, rumours” of his “mad mum”, whose “health improvements never last”. He shares everything with new soul mate Harper but is unable to tell his teacher, Miss Knowles (Maybury’s colourfully attired second character), of the real reason why he has been late to school three times this week.
Recently qualified, enthusiastic, but with much to learn, her inexperience leads her to respond by rote, sentencing him to detention, rather than investigating further, and it must be hoped that one of the consequences of this play’s exposure of children suffering in silence is a greater understanding, a willingness to dig deeper, to look beneath the surface.
Harper, by contrast, does not reveal her own situation to school poetry champion Andy, instead attributing her father’s need to move to being in the military. She wants to be there to support Andy, rather than burden him with the truth of her “mad dad”, whose doctors are “always holding something back”.
Sophie Maybury’s Harper and Sean Cameron’s Andy in a playful moment in My Mad Mum
When the revelation comes, it is a shattering moment, portrayed with intense emotional impact by Cameron’s initially wounded Andy and Maybury’s caring Harper.
They share a love of dance moves, one expressed throughout in Bailey Dowler’s carefree movement direction, culminating in the joyful finale of their heightened bond, Andy in a Tomato Ketchup costume, Harper in Yellow Mustard, each topped off by a cone (as if for squeezing).
For all the seriousness of the play’s topic, Stones and director Kate Veysey bring out the humour too, whether in those condiment costumes; a “Mustard/must admit” pun; Harper still writing with a fountain pen or Cameron’s portrayal of the frankly scary head of behaviour, Mr Fletcher.
Catherine Chapman’s fold-out set design turns into a house door for Seam Cameron’s Andy to express frustration with Sophie Maybury’s Harper
Catherine Chapman’s set design is minimalist but all the more effective for that economy: two chairs, one yellow, the other grey, matching the contrasting colours of a fold-up framework that can turn into a bus stop, a slide, a school room, a doorway or a house front.
Stones, Veysey and Cameron and Maybury, in their NDB1 debuts, combine with similarly striking effect in an eye-opening, heartfelt, deeply caring piece of theatre in the cause of social change.
Next Door But One presents My Mad Mum at York Explore, May 13 and 14, 5.30pm, and on schools’ tour.