Ursula Mohan plays Flo at the Bridge House Theatre, Penge, on 6 and 7 November. Tickets £17, £15 and £13, no booking fees. Built from tapes recorded in 1969.
A one-woman play built out of tape recordings made in a north London living room in 1969 is coming to Penge for two nights in November.
Flo Smith - Now and Then plays the Bridge House Theatre, 2 High Street, Penge, on Friday 6 and Saturday 7 November. Tickets are £17, £15 and £13, with no booking fees, through thebridgehousetheatre.co.uk. The play has its own site at flonowandthen.co.uk.
Flo is played by Ursula Mohan, a professional actress who wrote to us about the booking. She has lived in south east London for many years.
“I am a professional actress and have lived for many years in South East London. I started my career aged 15 and am still working as a pensioner!”
The production has been touring venues in London and beyond. Ms Mohan says it “has been very well received by critics and audiences alike”.
The play started with a drama student and a tape recorder
Flo was a real person. Florence Smith was the paternal grandmother of the actor and writer Christopher Saul, who wrote and directs the play. He recorded her in the spring of 1969, while he was a drama student looking for a dissertation subject. This is his own account, from the information sheet sent with the poster:
“At the end of the sixties, I was a drama student in my final year. Casting around for a subject for my dissertation, I hit on the idea of interviewing and recording the reminiscences of Florence Smith, my paternal grandmother. ‘Nanny Smith’ was happy to oblige and so for several days in the Spring of 1969, I sat in her cosy living room at Richie House, Hazelville Road, North London, drinking copious amounts of tea and listening avidly while spool after spool of my tape recorder was filled with her recollections.”
The recordings sat for years. Ms Mohan says he later turned them into a book, and then into this play.
What Florence told him covered most of a century:
- a Victorian childhood
- her marriage to a young man who was later seriously wounded in the First World War, Mr Saul’s grandfather
- her struggle to put food on the table for hungry children in the 1930s
- her experiences of the London Blitz
Mr Saul’s own summary of the material is worth reading before you decide whether to book:
“For the times, it was a common enough story and yet, for all that, a unique one too, as unique as any human being’s life.”
The play is set in 1969, with Flo looking back. The poster puts the span as the Boer War to the Summer of Love.
Dates, prices and where it is
The theatre is at 2 High Street, Penge, SE20 8RZ. The production’s information sheet puts it “30 seconds from Penge West Station”.
Start times were not included in the poster or the information sheet sent to us, so check the curtain-up time on the theatre’s own booking page before you travel. We will add the times here once the theatre confirms them.
Who is in it
Ursula Mohan started at Wimbledon Theatre aged 15 and won a scholarship to train at the Webber Douglas. Her credits, as listed on the production’s information sheet, include:
- Queen Elizabeth the Second in Handbagged, and There or Here at the Park Theatre
- a female King Lear at the Tristan Bates Theatre in 2016, reviving an acclaimed 2014 production
- Mrs Goulding in The Veil at the National Theatre, and Mrs Fox in the Dad’s Army UK tour
- Ala in Tango, directed by Trevor Nunn, and Peter Brook’s US for the RSC
- Emilia in Othello at Regent’s Park, and the title role in The Good Woman of Setzuan at Hampstead
- Joyce, the cockney clippie, in many episodes of On the Buses, and more recently Emmerdale
Christopher Saul trained at Rose Bruford College and has appeared in more than 20 Royal Shakespeare Company productions, most recently Jacques in As You Like It and Imperium at Stratford and in the West End. His screen work includes Enola Holmes 2, Dr Who, One Foot in the Grave and Emmerdale. He won a Helen Hayes Award in 2013 for his roles in the Shakespeare Globe’s touring production of Hamlet.
What has been said about it
The poster carries five lines from reviews with no names on them. That was a space decision, not an absence of sources: Ursula Mohan told us the critics are named on the production’s own site, and they are. Below are the fuller quotes as flonowandthen.co.uk gives them, with the poster line each one was cut down to.
Corrected 7 September: this section originally said the poster’s shorter quotes ran without attribution and should be treated as the production’s own selection. Every one of them is a named review, credited on the play’s website. The names are now below.
Gill Sutherland, Stratford Herald, 1 March 2018, cut on the poster to “Funny, feisty & frank”:
“Feisty, funny and frank. A working class London girl who has endured poverty, injustice, a troubled upbringing, love and loss, her reminisces intermingle with world events… it is this intimate biographical detail framed against the background politics that give her gossipy ramblings a historical importance and unique insightfulness.”
Harriett Gilbert, of BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read, 27 June 2019, cut to “The best kind of history lesson”:
“Funny, poignant, often both at once, Flo is both an engaging personal story and the best kind of history lesson.”
Michelle Magorian, author of Goodnight Mr Tom, who supplies two of the poster lines, “A compelling survival story” and “A wonderful play with music and sounds that draw you to another place”:
“A moving, humorous and compelling survival story… a fantastic performance from Ursula Mohan. A wonderful play with sound effects that draw you to another time and another place.”
Joe Nolan, The Audience Club, 1 February 2019, cut to “A tremendous personal performance punctuated with both humour and sadness”:
“A tremendous engaging and personal performance from beginning to end punctuated with both humour and sadness during a lifetime of family relationships against the backdrop through wartimes and beyond. Thoroughly recommended, and maybe a good lesson to ‘tune in’ with our elders life experiences before it is too late.”
Two more recent notices are not on the poster at all. David Vass, on the performance at the Corn Hall in Diss, 14 November 2025:
“Understated, yet riveting fiction. Ursula Mohan’s pitch-perfect portrait of a woman in her third age, her body slowed down by aching bones but with a mind as sharp as ever, was both moving and compelling. Her story, of a girl growing up in poverty, estranged from her family and struggling with the privations of war-torn Britain, had an authentic specificity and yet spoke for a generation.”
Gwyneth Rushton, Petersfield Post, 31 October 2024:
“A remarkable story of survival from a time when parts of London still had the atmosphere of village communities […] a truly engrossing account of danger, tenacity and courage played out in the living room of a fun grandparent, played effortlessly by Ursula Mohan.”
The site also carries a second Stratford Herald line from Gill Sutherland on Ms Mohan herself, calling her “entirely convincing… a spunky old dear who has seen it all”, and a three-word verdict from the journalist and professor Hugh Stephenson, 28 June 2019: “Not to be missed”.
What it means for you
Two nights, one small room above a pub, and a play that is mostly one woman talking. That combination sells out or it does not go at all, so if you want it, book rather than turn up.
- When: Friday 6 and Saturday 7 November 2026
- Where: The Bridge House Theatre, 2 High Street, Penge SE20 8RZ
- Tickets: £17, £15 and £13, no booking fees, at thebridgehousetheatre.co.uk
- Getting there: Penge West station, 30 seconds away according to the production
- More about the play: flonowandthen.co.uk
If you are planning the trip by train, our Bromley train times to London page has the routes and typical journey times. More borough listings are on our things to do in Bromley page.
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