Some Other Mother @ various venues, 6-27 Jun

Writer AJ Taudevin, whose new play Some Other Mother is part of Refugee Week Scotland, is unafraid to use her work as a sounding board and a rallying cry for activism and change. “We are living in a time when people are being even more marginalised than ever,” she says. “The time for community action to make a more just, welcoming and inclusive society is perhaps more urgent now than it ever was before.”

Taudevin's experiences of working with women's groups and asylum seekers inform the play: “I have worked in communities united by a belief in human rights and a more just society, and communities ravaged by the kind of suspicion that is often a byproduct of marginalisation,” she says. Discussing the “brutality” of the UK’s asylum model, she notes: “The structures of support for people living in marginalised communities are equally restricted as austerity demolishes the welfare state and lived experience of societal solidarity dies out. I knew for a long time that I wanted to translate some of my experience into theatre but I struggled to know which story was mine to tell.”

Taudevin speaks candidly of her own “mongrel identity” – she is half Scottish, half French/Australian, and grew up in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, returning to her mother’s family on the Isle of Lewis each summer. She describes herself as “a wee melting pot of a wean... with many different languages, accents, religious influences, environments and social structures.” When she began to work with LINKES, she found she “really bonded” with the asylum seeker children “thrown into the melting pot that is multicultural Glasgow.”

This, for Taudevin, was the play’s genesis. “I recognise that instinct and is probably why I chose to tell Some Other Mother through the eyes of a ten year old child who is constantly trying to understand the world around her,” she says. “The result is a highly surreal, fantastical, amusing telling of what is at the core a heart breaking story.” [Bram E. Gieben]