Young female playwright’s debut depicts mother-daughter struggles

Actions definitely speak louder than words for north-west Londoner Alexandra Hart.

At the age of 12, when most girls were still playing with their toys, Alexandra and her friend Phoebe Sleeman were starting to write their first book.

Then, when the war in Ukraine started and people were seeking refuge in the UK, Alexandra wondered how they would cope in a country where they could not speak the language. So Alexandra, then a student at Durham University, offered to teach English to Ukrainian schoolchildren. Within two days, she had 500 people reply, so she set up a foundation and roped in friends and supporters to provide English language tuition.

“I like to use my skill set to solve crises,” says Alexandra, who is now 23.

And problem solver Alexandra is still very busy. Her latest incarnation is as a playwright, and she hopes her first play will help her audience be more understanding of others.

Mother Know Best  spans many decades, and centres around three sets of Jewish mothers and daughters in Russia in 1905, in South Africa in the 1960s, and in Israel in the 2020s. They may be from very different eras, but they have a great deal in common. In all three scenes, the mother and daughter disagree with each other, whether it be about the pogroms faced by Jews in Russia, the clash of Jewish beliefs with the apartheid of South Africa or the conflict in modern Israel.

Mother Knows Best explores how oppression is cyclical, and how domesticity hides the horrors of the world outside your front door. Invisible to each other, these three stories push each other forward, echoing struggles down the generations.

Alexandra explains: “The situation is Israel has changed so much and it has become very personal. I thought long and hard about how I could impact change and then I realised that the only power I have is in my writing. And I realised by creating these three moments of intense social conflict I could help people understand what is going on and how it affects Jewish people. But the play does not just speak to Jewish audiences – it speak to all audiences.

Alexandra is now completing a creative writing degree at Oxford University and  is writing a novel based on her family’s experiences in South Africa

Directing the play will be Josh Baumring-Gledhill, the co-author of Holocaust play Not Even the Dogs and artistic director at the Counterminers – a company that develops new works from emerging artists.

The 75-minute-long play has nine performers will be premiered in a read-through performance as part of Lambeth Fringe.

Mother Knows Best is at Bread and Roses Theatre in Clapham 18-19 October. breadandrosestheatre.co.uk