Ni Mi Madre 
Written and performed by Arturo Luiz Soria and directed by Danilo Gambini, the vibrant Ni Mi Madre arrives in Edinburgh from its award winning run in New York.
With bravado and wit, Arturo parodies his mother, a larger than life Brasileira living in Miami. She is a tough, foul mouthed lady who has married three times, likes a drink or two, decorates rooms in tropical fruit colours and uses Meryl Streep’s movies as a guide for her mothering skills. Sophie’s choice is a favourite.
But as we hear her story in detail we begin to understand why she may be such a mess, revealing that her own mother was not the best of rôle models. As the daughter of a black Brazilian mother and an Italian father, she was born with fair skin and green eyes. She was not poor, but on nearby Ipanema beach, rich ladies would assume that her mother was a nanny. After a brief spell at military school, due to financial problems and perhaps because her light skinned daughter did not blend in at home, unannounced, her mother sent her to live with her grandparents in Italy. Somehow, years later she ended up married with kids in Florida.
Central to her monologue is the combative relationship with her gay son from her first husband. As a child she believed little Arturo was constantly challenging her, so she responded with physical punishments and cruel mental games which were both random and specific.
Although superficially accepting his queerness, after her ballet-dancing son’s coming out and his expressing a desire to leave home, she encourages him to do so, but shockingly tells him not to return, because “That’s not what we do. We go forward and don’t look back.” She never returned to Brazil to see her mother and Arturo should act accordingly.
It is from Arturo’s writing and acting skills that we read between the lines, and sense his mother’s feeling of rejection and her longing for tenderness. Through no fault of her own, she does not know what it is to give or receive love.
And she does not expect love from her husbands either. Her dealings with men are perfunctory. They are at best, there for her sexual use and financial support. And meanwhile her children, her own flesh and blood, are a burden. Is she a product of her upbringing or was she born a narcissist?
In the period of an hour, to a soundtrack of uplifting nineties pop and chilled Brazilian beats Arturo changes in a flash from manic mother to estranged daughter and back again as he navigates her life story. His masterful, therapeutic impersonation is a celebration, an indictment and a call for forgiveness across generations.
Bristol Square
Daily at 4.05pm excluding 19th, until 26th August
Robert Malcolm is an Interior Designer who relocated from London to his home town of Edinburgh in 2019. Under the pen name of Bobby Burns he had his first novel, a gay erotic thriller called Bone Island published by Homofactus Press in 2011.
