Mother Has Arrived - Than Hussein Clark Interview

‘Mother Has Arrived’, a new durational performance in a gallery by theatre director and artist Than Hussein Clark based on the life of his mother, premieres this September.

Photo by Kaasm Aziz.

‘Mother Has Arrived’ is Than Hussein Clark’s homage to his mother, Martha Fuller Clark. The production details Matha’s life from her birth in 1942 to the present day, navigating between biography and fiction through verbatim and devised theatre. Narratives were extracted from recorded conversations between the artist and his mother, recently discovered recordings of the artist’s father, and archival audio of historical events. The play is performed by two actors and one prosthetics artist housed within a uniquely conceived glass vitrine stage at the Corvi-Mora gallery in South London.

This deeply personal story is revealed over the play’s six-and-a-half-hour duration, as one actor gradually morphs into Martha now, aged 84, and may be watched in its entirety or in part. Conceived in dialogue with the temporal, spatial, and structural conventions of a gallery exhibition, ‘Mother Has Arrived’ begins the moment that the gallery opens to the public and is timed to finish when the gallery closes, and the Mother arrives. It is written, designed and directed by Than Hussein Clark and produced by The Director’s Theatre Writer’s Theatre.

We sat down with Than Hussein Clark to learn more about the show

What can you tell me about Mother Has Arrived?

Mother Has Arrived, is a six and a half hour play dedicated to my mother, Senator Martha Fuller Clark. It is built out of a set of interviews I did with her about her life. As the play evolved, the story of her life became integrated into the story of two people making a movie in Los Angeles. They are played by two actors, who perform inside an enclosed glass vitrine, accompanied by a prosthetics artist.

It is a personal exploration of my mother, but it's also a meditation on the ways in which gay men's relationships with their mothers have been portrayed in popular culture over the last 50 and 60 years. 

How did you approach developing the piece?

We used those interviews with my mother to start a devising process. We developed the piece, in a few periods of R&D over the last year, using techniques drawn from verbatim theatre. So the actors have sections in which they hear my mother speaking through in-ear monitors, and also through techniques such as active analysis and improvisation.

The production runs over 6.5 hours, how have you been preparing for this?

We have been preparing for the duration by running the piece in longer and longer blocks, and making sure the actors are following a nutrition and health plan to increase their stamina. Surprisingly, we found in rehearsals that they were okay, actually, when they've gone for the full six and a half hours. 

The way we have approached rehearsals is very technical, as well as creative. We lined up a time code next to the audio from my mother’s interviews, linked through Q-Lab to the DMX panels controlling the set. So everything runs along what we might think of as a huge audio track. The script is broken down into six acts, each about 15 scenes. Those scenes are split up into even smaller units. Not only have we rehearsed in large chunks, but we've also rehearsed it minute by minute, second by second. 

Photo by Kaasm Aziz.

The piece is a personal exploration of your mother, how much of a passion project has this been?

It's always a passion project, right? If you're asking me if it's a vanity project because it's about my own mother, it starts from my own my mother's life, and my relationship to my own mother, to form a kind of launch pad to explore the ways in which that dynamic has been marshalled, mixed up, and manoeuvred for different historical and political reasons.

You blend biographical with fictional elements, how have you chosen to blend both together?

We use real interview material, real audio clips from moments in world history, and around all that we also have scripted dialogue and references to movies and popular culture.

The actors have a very detailed set of 16 different transitions that they've worked on both vocally and physically. Those transitions stand in for different journeys through space and time, linking these different types of material together. But as the play progresses, we take more and more liberty and kind of spin further and further, layering the factual or verbatim material on top of the fictional material, on top of the documentary material. So by the fifth and sixth hour, the division between those two things have collapsed. 

Can you tell me an interesting fact about the piece?
At one point in the rehearsals, we realised that there were certain steps during the prosthetics procedure when one of the actors can’t speak for an extended period. When we looked at the timeline for the story at that moment, we realised that that was the exact year that my parents met in 1969. And that reminded me that before my father died, he was engaged in a kind of ghost written biography or memoir project. And I thought to myself, well, he didn't finish it. I wonder if they still have the recordings, the recordings perhaps being very similar to the recordings that I had made with my mom. We got into contact with the company and halfway through the first research and development period, we had 25 hours of my father speaking from beyond the grave.

What was the first piece of theatre that had a big impact on you?

Angels in America. Speaking of my father, he took me to the debut production when I was 10, thinking he was being really modern and thinking “I'm going to bring my gay son to a massive gay play”. And then I saw it again, the most recent production that was at the National Theatre, and I saw it with him on his 80th birthday before he died. And I was sort of overwhelmed with how much of the piece I had taken with me and hadn't even realised. 

What keeps you inspired?

Trying to figure out how to adequately respond to the horror of the present.

Photo by Kaasm Aziz.

What do you hope someone takes away from seeing Mother Has Arrived?

That doom scrolling isn't just a habit, but also a way of working

Where and when can audiences see the piece?
Come to the Corvi-Mora Gallery in Kennington, 4 Sept -3 Oct 2025. Watch throughout, or in part. Opening hours Thu-Sat, 11am-6pm. Ages 16+. Tickets £10 via: https://mother-has-arrived.eventbrite.com 

Than Hussein Clark is the founder and Artistic Director of The Director's Theatre Writer's Theatre, the resident company of London Performance Studios