Review: Call Me Mother at The Blue Room Theatre

Call Me Mother at The Blue Room Theatre
Friday, January 30, 2026

As the Blue Room’s royal-blue glow settled over the audience like a held breath and the lights dimmed, a charged, anticipatory aura emerged—the sense that you’re not about to be entertained so much as addressed. Call Me Mother wasted no time in proving that instinct right.

Scarlet Rose—who played themself under the name Scar—opened with abrasive dissonance that felt closer to acerbic punk than theatre. All grit and rupture. Backlit red in a doorway, body braced, Scar screamed and gestured with a ferocity that bordered on the primal before the sound was cut off mid-throat, plunging the room into brutal silence. The Rage Against The Machine here wasn’t rhetorical; it was physical. “The rage in me is fucking huge,” they declared. “Much larger than ‘fuck the patriarchy’.” It was an important distinction, setting the tone for a work that refused neat political slogans in favour of lived contradiction.

What followed was not a linear narrative but an excavation. Childhood memories unspooled alongside bodily autonomy, desire, and violence—personal and institutional. Scar spoke of being “meant to be a boy”, of puberty arriving as betrayal, of crossing the invisible line from acceptable tomboy to something queerer, more threatening. Home videos played on a makeshift bedsheet screen: a father with a 90s mullet, Women’s Weekly–era homemade birthday cakes, and working-class domesticity rendered without irony or apology. These weren’t cheap laughs or nostalgic diary entries; they were contextual anchors.

The piece frequently disrupted itself. At one point Scar stood like a stand-up comic at a lone mic, delivering sharp “gotcha” jokes laced with overt sexism—not for laughs, but exposure. Quirky game-show-style musical interludes hovered somewhere between comic relief and provocation. Elsewhere, a traumatic birthing scene from House of the Dragon played in sped-up gore, set incongruously to Girl from Ipanema. The absurdity didn’t dilute the violence; it sharpened it. That millions consume this kind of patriarchal spectacle as entertainment was the point. Trauma porn, laid bare.

Throughout, the construction of the work was deliberately visible. Scar hung laundry during video playback—a mash of masc, femme, and children’s wear—later dressing in some of those same clothes. A dressing gown draped over the mic stand read less as exhaustion than refusal. Even when the handheld mic was passed into the audience, agency didn’t disperse; it relocated.

One of the show’s most striking shifts came during an exquisite bathing scene: Scar, standing in a half-calm pool like a Venus, was held briefly in reverent stillness. That serenity was abruptly undercut as The Stripper pulled the rug out—a recognisable, old-school strip-club instrumental whose sleaze-funk lineage signals desire as performance. The feminine tableau tipped into bawdy farce as plastic jugs were hoisted to cup their chests. “Ladies and gentlemen,” they announced, “my jugs!” Breasts here were not fetish objects but antagonists—a body part that kept growing, betraying them, luring others into misrecognition.

The second half, titled Partum, turned explicitly towards pregnancy and its aftermath. “I was comfortably non-binary,” Scar said, “and then I fell pregnant.” What followed was a harrowing account of being repeatedly misgendered, spoken about in the third person, and treated as a vessel rather than a person. An emergency caesarian was described in visceral detail—organs removed and replaced, their body “like a hunk of meat”—body horror more confronting than anything on screen.

As a cis woman sans children, watching, I was acutely aware of my position—what resonated and what didn’t belong to me. Call Me Mother doesn’t ask for identification so much as attention. It insists that motherhood, gender, and embodiment are not singular experiences, and that care without comprehension is not really care at all.

By the end, what lingered wasn’t shock but generosity. This was not a performance asking to be admired. It was a reckoning—intimate, furious, and unflinchingly self-aware in the face of a world determined to define that selfhood.

CAT LANDRO