« Mother Has Arrived »
Last Saturday I saw a play called « Mother Has Arrived ». It was written and directed by Than Hussein Clark, an American artist based in Glasgow and Genoa. His project was half of a larger installation called « Anal Peace » that is being shown at Corvi-Mora, an art-gallery in South London. Clark’s half lasted six and a half hours. It was one of the most weirdly satisfying pieces of performance art I’ve seen in years.
In the middle of the gallery space is a frosted-glass-and-metal aviary-like enclosure — which, like all the production’s furniture, was made by Clark. Inside it, two young men are chatting, one of them in boxer shorts and a dressing gown, the other in a dark suit. A prosthetics artist attends to the man in boxers. The two men are shooting a film — that’s one strand of the story — but they also repeatedly get struck by bolts of lightning and are possessed by other personas, chiefly the playwright and his parents.
The young man in the dark suit is sometimes Clark, whom we learn is the gay renegade son of an East Coast Establishment family, and sometimes he’s Clark’s late father, a New England doctor; the young man in boxers periodically morphs into Clark’s now 83-year-old mother Martha, who was a long-serving state senator and chairwoman of the Democratic Party. Clark’s interviews with his mother provide the play’s backbone: prompted by her son’s questions, Martha recalls — or sometimes has nothing much to say about — her marriage, her political career, the birth of her three children. All the achievements, sorrows, and favorite holidays of an upper-crust liberal American family are revealed in their everyday banality, and made touching, even fascinating by Clark’s voracious determination to understand his parents and to set their experience against a backdrop of national calamities from the Bay of Pigs to Trump.
Over the hours — no break for the actors in their glass cage, though the audience wanders freely in and out of the gallery — the young actor in boxers gives way, under the prosthetic artist’s ministrations, to « Martha » with her wattled neck, bulbous little nose, age-speckled arms, and finally a head of short curly white hair. This elderly matriarch, croaky, affable, voices her advice to young women contemplating a career in politics, her worries about an Alzheimer’s diagnosis — above all, we sense her eagerness to please a son who is difficult, a middle child who feels less loved than his siblings. Gradually, in another turn of the screw, Clark’s more radical and incisive political insights will start infiltrating Martha’s centrist-Democrat platitudes, and the retired senator is infected by her son’s desire to turn her into a drag-queen icon. Mother is…on her way!!
In the play’s concluding climax, the son-who-is-also-his-dying-father dresses up the surprised but pleased Martha in a Statue of Liberty costume, festooning her in strings of costume pearls. « That’s nice, sweetie, » she says, placidly. « Are these for me? »
I worried about the exquisite cage Clark had constructed for his green-gowned goddess with her peacock-crown of freedom-thorns. What does it mean to put the Statue of Liberty in a bell-jar? Is she ever going to get out of there? Still, what the audience was left with was the unassuageable fierceness of the prodigal son’s love — all four hundred sweet minutes of it — as well as an inkling of why this singular artist can best perform his love 3,000 miles away from Mother.
« Mother Has Arrived » is being shown through 3 October 2025 at CORVI-MORA, 1a Kempsford Road, London SE11 4NU. It’s part of « Anal Piece », a joint exhibition by Than Hussein Clark and David Lieske.
