Speechless by Dea Birkett

I’ve complained that my teenager is only interested in going to performances that mirror her own life. But we all like a piece of theatre to hold a mirror to our own lives. So I spent our last day at the Fringe watching plays about my family.

I have three children. Two of them are twins. And twins, from Shakespeare onwards, are the stuff of theatre. They’re generally regarded by singletons as mysterious and menacing.

Speechless at the Traverse was a true-life drama about two identical black girls growing up in Britain in the 1960s and ‘70s. June and Jennifer Gibbons refused to speak to anyone except each other. Nicknamed ‘the twinnies’ by their mother, they formed a dyad against a society they regarded as enemy to their intimacy.

In every mirror held up to our lives, however distorted, there’s often a disquieting grain of truth. My twins do not use silence as a weapon against a hostile world. But sometimes I shout out ‘Twinnies!’ to get their attention. Does that mean I regard them as one? Speechless was theatre that rattled me. It wriggled right into the heart of my family, into what we call each other at home. I have not shouted out ‘Twinnies!’ since.

The second show was Expectations, a conventional play about two conventional couples. But one had a child with a disability; the other terminated a pregnancy when they discovered their child had a chromosome condition. My teenage child who isn’t a twin is disabled – she uses a wheelchair – so this was another reflection of our family life played out on a public stage. I went to see it with my teenager (who had to go in the good’s lift and have buckets and mops moved to reach the venue). Sometimes a mirror isn’t just distorted, but held up under too strong a light revealing all your flaws. This is how Expectations felt; when the mother of the disabled child said the doctors who hovered around her, ‘make me feel like she’s not my baby,’ I remembered things I’d far rather forget.

This was our final Fringe performance. If next year’s Fringe is as big a sellout as this year’s, we’ll have to start booking now. Perhaps they’ll be a play that really holds up my life for inspection. A musical called Middle Aged Mama? I could sing along to it. I probably know all the words already.

Speechless is at Bute Theatre, Cardiff 15 September-2 October

www.edfringe.com