Attachment at Liverpool Everyman

Society tends to place adoptive parents on a pedestal. But it can be lonely up there.

Developed alongside adoptive families from Merseyside, Julia Cranney’s one-woman show Attachment centres on Mat, a Scouse woman who works in a pharmacy and has organised her world so that it requires as little of other people as possible. She is drawn, unexpectedly, into the “early permanence” pathway: a relatively new arrangement within the care system that creates uncertainty for everyone.

Under this arrangement, prospective adopters foster a child from the moment it enters care, maintaining contact with birth family while the courts decide whether they can return home – meaning no guarantee the adoption will proceed. It asks a great deal of people who have already given a lot.

“People who adopt are often put on a pedestal,” Cranney says, “but it’s so hard to be on a pedestal when you’re asking for help and nobody’s there on your level to help you.” The system, she argues, assumes a parent’s love will fill the gaps the state has left.

The monologue form does a lot of work in removing that pedestal, with Mat speaking directly to the audience. “I wanted to put those voices and experiences on a one-to-one level”, Cranney says, “and the Everyman stage was born for monologues – making eye contact with your audience, that confessional thing.” It’s a form that helps argue that the adoptive parent is often misunderstood – while making the audience complicit in the misunderstanding.

Cranney, who is neurodiverse, describes Mat as “autistically coded” – a woman who has closed herself off since losing the grandmother who most understood her. From the outset, Mat knows what the audience thinks of her: about the way she looks, the way she acts, the way she handed her son to a stranger and didn’t even cry. But the play is as interested in what Mat doesn’t yet know about herself as in what others assume. Cranney is quick to add that it’s often very funny, with scouse humour cutting through what is otherwise a serious topic.

Paislie Reid, who plays Mat, is well known on screen – The Responder 2, Domino Day, Brassic – but her roots run deep in Liverpool’s community arts world, too. As co-founder of the Black Actors Collective and Associate Director at 20 Stories High, Reid has long made theatre for people whose stories rarely get told on stage.

Attachment is the fifth show in the Everyman’s Made in Liverpool strand, following the highly acclaimed The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Cranney trained through the Everyman’s own Young Everyman Playhouse programme; so did director Kate Treadell, whose credits at Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse include Blink, The Story Giant and Road. In bringing together writer, director and lead performer all from within that same local ecosystem, Made in Liverpool is doing exactly what it was designed to do: ensuring vital stories from the city’s next generation of artists reach the stage.

Since she wrote the work, Cranney describes the gap between what the system promises and what it delivers having only widened, lamenting the fact that adoption and kinship carer support grants have just been cut once again. The conversation the play wants to start feels more necessary than ever.