This play was live at Brighton Fringe 2025 and we’re proud to have supported it with a Q&A moderated by Lucy Duckworth, Policy Advisor at The Survivors Trust.
The Plot
In the late 1960s, Boy (aged 8) is sent away for a ten-year stretch at an all-boy boarding school in the distant district of peaks.
What prompted Mother – ignorant of any institutional malevolence – to abandon the child she dotes on into the care of people she knows nothing about?
Mummified by the experience, he careens through life causing havoc and damage to those who care for him, and equally to himself.
Sobering up is just the beginning, and the yearned-for journey back home is long, arduous and not guaranteed.
Only providence – in the shape of winged allies – can set him free. Will the birds come?
From the Author himself
I was inspired to write ‘Mummified’ after seeing ‘Fudgey’ – Tom Greaves’ show covering similar territory – at last year’s Brighton Fringe. I literally had one of those ‘If Tom can do this then why can’t I?’ moments.
Truth is that I’ve been wanting to create something like ‘Mummified’ for years. Intuitively I sensed that taking ownership of my experiences in the way a creative project like this allows, could be healing. I have found that to be the case in reality. I think it may be a simple as: I was powerless and without agency as a young boy at prep school, and now I feel I have agency. And it’s certainly generating a feeling of empowerment, though I have to watch my ego a bit!
Three things happened last year which spurred me into action. One was that my mother died. She, as a wise therapist once said to me, had cast a long shadow over my life. And right up to the end, in the last few months of her life, she was denying any responsibility for my prep school experiences of abuse and abandonment. And, I was still desperate for her to acknowledge some degree of responsibility. I felt compelled to try and understand why she, a mother, would have sent her loved son away to that place so young. Another was that I went to a vegan festival last summer and started to see a link between how cows are forcibly separated from their calves to ensure that they make more milk and learn about how the mother cow bellows for her calf, long after separation. It made me think about how much my mother had balled her eyes out as I was being driven away by my dad (probably a second term thing) and how, if I remember right, I had this ironic voice in my head going “she’s crying but I’m the one being sent away?”. At that festival something clicked in my head when I remembered that my sister had always, throughout our lives, called my mother “Moo”. That was a lightbulb moment. I began to see how we, mother and I, had been forcibly separated by powers outside our control.
The final thing that happened last year was that my efforts – so draining to mind, body and spirit – to get justice from my prep school were thwarted by what can only be described as “bullshit legalese”. They wriggled out of taking any responsibility for their negligence. The main reason being, despite my efforts to find someone, is that so far I am still the only one from that prep school who acknowledges being sexually abused by one particular master, a clear paedophile. Over the last ten years I have: attempted to sue the prep school twice (writing, as a former barrister, my own letter of claim and representing myself); been to give evidence to the IICSA; made a claim to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme; spoken to, or attempted to communicate with, a significant number of exact peers at the school; attended an old boy’s reunion; spoken to child abuse lawyers, three of whom said to me that they could help if I had corroboration.
Last year, I felt worn out and pretty much at the end of that road, of trying to get ‘justice’. I started to focus on doing what Gabrielle Roth – founder of The Five Rhythms and a teacher of mine – called “turning suffering into art”. Or at least making that attempt.
Marcus