Review: Mona and Mimi at the Unity Theatre ***
- Catherine Jones
- Sep 5
- 3 min read
When you talk about the women who were part of the Beatles ‘story’ it’s more usually the wives and girlfriends – people like Cynthia, Yoko, Pattie Boyd, Linda, Jane Asher and Maureen Cox.
So, it’s an interesting departure to step back a generation and focus instead on the females who helped forged their lives before the band, in John Lennon’s words, “made it very, very big”.
First time playwright Catherine Leen has done just that in her debut play Mona and Mimi, a (mostly) two-hander which imagines a meeting between two very different women as the original line up – Ringo not yet having joined – is on the cusp of the big time.
Mary Smith, known to Lennon and millions of Fab Four fans as ‘Aunt Mimi’, was the woman who brought up the bright but troubled John, a woman born a decade before the First World War and for whom sobriety, propriety, stoicism and respectability were guiding tenets.
Mona Best, mother of original Beatle drummer Pete, was a different generation and, in some ways, a different personality – a natural free spirit who was happy to defy a patriarchal society’s expectations of women.
I say in some, because Leen’s often intriguing work seeks to explore not only what divides the two matriarchs but what binds them too.
It’s December 1961, and Mimi – sorry, Mrs Smith – turns up on the doorstep of the Best’s huge house in West Derby to enlist Mona’s help in stopping what she sees as the foolishness of four young men hoping to sign a contract with Brian Epstein and break into the pop music business.
Mimi (Meriel Schofield) is worried it’s not a ‘proper’ career, they will fail and she will have to pick up the pieces as she did when Lennon returned, monosyllabic and wounded, from The Beatles’ first Hamburg residency.
Conversely, Mona (Fiona Boylan) is all for the move, and the two women initially clash over their very different visions of the future. But as the evening progresses, they come, if not to agreement, at least to a better understanding of the other.
I said it was mostly a two-hander, because while we never see any of The Beatles themselves, Noah Fox’s Neil Aspinall – friend, roadie and something more – makes a brief appearance to stir things up.
It’s a thoughtful premise, although at present Mona and Mimi still feels like a bit of a work in progress.
Aunt Mimi has often been perceived as cold and strict, and director Nick Bagnall says he was keen to make sure he gave her ‘a voice’ and look behind her public image.
He’s certainly done that, working with Leen and the cast to create a more sympathetic and understandable character – Schofield’s Mrs Smith is as conflicted and bruised as her acerbic nephew for whom she has a deep and elemental affection.
She’s a woman who has suffered loss and disappointment, and there are flashes of jealousy as she admits the fear that this strange world, full of strange people, will take John away from her.
In fact, Mimi has become such a strongly defined and forceful character that it rather unbalances the narrative, leaving Boylan’s sweeter, sunnier and more optimistic Mona feeling underdeveloped.
We sense from what she says – a lifetime of battling prejudice because of her sex, owning her own home, opening her own business – that she’s just as steely and determined as her sparring partner.
But while Mimi arrives for combat with a full arsenal of arguments against the music business and Epstein himself (Mimi’s disdain of someone she evidently considers a dilettante is amusing), Mona’s rather repetitive rebuttal seems to mostly consist of gut feeling that the boys will make it big and Brian is the man to help them do that.
I suppose it’s the verbal equivalent of the flower down the barrel of the gun, but it does feel rather passive and makes the narrative feeling a bit lopsided. It would increase the sense of drama if Mona delivered some more robust counterarguments.
Saying that, Leen certainly succeeds in shining a spotlight on these two women who were both of their time but also immortalised for eternity, and there's plenty to digest and discuss on the way home.
Top: Noah Fox (Neil Aspinall), Meriel Schofield (Mary 'Mimi' Smith) and Fiona Boylan (Mona Best) in Mona and Mimi.