The Weeding Cane

 The play tells the story of Joy, a child left with her grandma in the Caribbean when her mother leaves to go to England. Communication between mother and daughter is sparse and comes through occasional letters and presents of new shoes and ribbons. When Joy’s beloved grandma dies, she is unceremoniously shipped to England where she meets her mother with a label around her neck like a parcel. 

Joy enters a new world, moving into her strange new home with its indoor bathroom and appliances like a washing machine – so different from her simpler island home. An uneasy and troubled reconciliation ensues, as she becomes the outsider to her mother’s new family of husband and half siblings. Weeding Cane, directed by Wyllie Longmore, is told simply and movingly in a sparse poetic style. The actions and words of Joy and her mother, movingly played by Carla Henry and Juliet Ellis, are underscored by an evocative double bass played live on stage by Jim Parris. 

This is a well crafted and moving new play by Sonia Hughes. Having built her reputation as a performance poet of some note, Sonia ‘retired’ from the spoken word scene and is fast building a name as an exceptional playwright with an original style. She said about the play , ‘I started writing in 1999 when I joined a family literacy project at my son’s primary school. As part of this project I wrote the story called Weeding Cane. Weeding Cane, the short story, was written surprisingly quickly. It was a story I’d observed in my own house as my sister had come to join the family from St Kitts when I was one and she was twelve years old. 

So the words just tumbled out of my head onto the page in one evening. The play, took far longer. After raising funds and approaching the green room in Manchester, I interviewed other women who had been through similar experiences of being left in the Caribbean and then brought to England to join their families. This immediately made the story I needed to tell richer and more complex.