Charlotte Keatley's primary contribution to contemporary theater is her highly acclaimed play My Mother Said I Never Should. She received the Manchester Evening News Best New Play award after the play's initial run in Manchester in 1987, and after its transfer to London in 1989 she won the Plays and Players award and shared the prestigious George Devine Award for Best New Playwright. She was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Most Promising Newcomer to British Theatre in 1990. Considered a modern classic, My Mother Said I Never Should is one of the most frequently performed plays in Britain; it has been translated into seventeen languages and has been produced in many other countries.

Keatley told Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge in a 1997 interview that she emphasizes the "silent vocabulary" of theater--choreography, lights, gestures, and glances between characters--because "no line of dialogue can carry as many multiple meanings as that moment in...