Two women circle each other warily. One is dowdy, ill at ease and very British. The other, her stepdaughter, is sharp, assertive and thoroughly American. Sometimes they speak to each other, sometimes they address us directly. Now that they’ve been thrown together, do they have anything at all in common?
Anna Ziegler’s new two-hander at the Donmar Warehouse is a hypnotic, sometimes very funny portrait of figures from different generations who discover that the loss of their mothers creates a bond of sorts between them. If that sounds like the outline of a conventionally uplifting piece of against-all-odds storytelling, Ziegler and the director Diyan Zora build the narrative out of shards and fragments, as if piecing together a broken mirror. Each sentence draws us in closer.
A script as allusive as this requires performances of the highest quality, and Anastasia Hille and Erin Kellyman duly deliver. Hille is utterly convincing as Jennifer, a solitary, cardigan-wearing records clerk who has stumbled into a love affair after years of caring for her late mother. Everything about her is hesitant; her fingers flutter constantly, her frail voice seems trapped in her throat.
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Kellyman, who you may have seen in Caitlin Moran’s sitcom Raised by Wolves, makes a thoroughly assured professional stage debut as Delilah, a mixed-race art history student from New York who constantly passes judgment on Jennifer’s unhip, unwoke worldview. Her Jamaican mother, an academic, died in her thirties and memories of her weigh heavily, slowly revealing Delilah’s insecurities. The uncompromising opinions that she hands down at the start give way to fractious thoughts as the Covid lockdown ensures that she and Jennnifer spend more time under the same roof.
Ziegler’s last play to be seen in London was the drily schematic family drama The Wanderers. Evening All Afternoon (which takes its title from a line in a poem by Wallace Stevens) has all the heart and passion so sorely lacking in the other work. The subtle power dynamics reminded me of another of the Donmar’s mother-daughter studies: Anna Mackmin’s Backstroke, starring Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig, which was greeted with surprisingly tepid reviews a year ago.
Ziegler cleverly leaves things unsaid. We’re constantly left guessing, for example, about Delilah’s father, who has brought her back to Britain. The conversation and confessions unfurl on Basia Binkowska’s sparsely furnished set design, a sea of warm blue in which bare light bulbs rise and descend from the ceiling. Adam Cork’s sound design adds a hint of the hallucinatory. We are inside the minds of characters who speak a different language and have very different thoughts. We never want to stop eavesdropping.
★★★★☆
85min
Donmar Warehouse, London, to April 11, donmarwarehouse.com