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The starry, talented duo of Golda Rosheuvel (Bridgerton) and Letitia Wright (Black Panther) don’t have quite enough to work with in this paean to black mothers and daughters, created by writer Emma Dennis-Edwards and director Lynette Linton.
The script starts off like a firecracker: one-liners zing back and forth as the two actresses get their teeth into themes of intergenerational resentment. But the impetus stalls two thirds of the way through and the play lapses into repetition and mawkishness. Not that this will trouble the Bush Theatre’s box office: the extended run is mostly sold out.
Rosheuvel is Joyce, a hard-partying, twice-divorced London-Guyanese executive assistant who raised her surly twentysomething daughter Erica (Wright) alone. They are travelling to Guyana together to scatter the ashes of Joyce’s late mother, Erica’s grandmother Elaine. Both actresses also play the austere, unbending Elaine in flashback or as a phantom summoned from memory. Elaine was a single mother too, who brought Joyce to London as a child after an incident that’s revealed late. The play debates what a child owes her mother, and vice versa, in a world where men are merely feckless and swiftly absent impregnators.
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Joyce is a lovely, self-centred comic creation, willfully misunderstanding her daughter’s job and the name of her boyfriend Lanray, and embarrassing her by sucking down drinks in business class and buttering up the barman in their Georgetown hotel. The two do, however, bond over a shared love of sinewy, hip-grinding dance moves and the idea of a double-dose of actor Michael B Jordan playing twins in his movie Sinners. (A nice in-joke: Jordan co-starred with Wright in Black Panther and Ryan Coogler directed both films.)
The beady irony Rosheuvel brings to Joyce is matched by the withering pique and mortification that Wright exudes as Erica. The younger woman is well-versed in the language of grievance and therapeutic healing and is “reassessing” her relationship with alcohol. For her, the trip to Guyana is a religious ritual, offering libations to the granny she nursed through a final illness (dementia, it’s implied).
For Joyce it’s a chore, to be leavened by rum and local snacks. There’s a great moment of physical comedy when Erica gets a bit of her granny in her eyes and mouth thanks to a changing wind.
Where it falls apart is in the depiction of Elaine: Rosheuvel and Wright seem not to have agreed on a shared physical language for the matriarch, or the depth of her Caribbean accent. Both lapse into hackneyed tropes of child-acting when playing the young versions of Joyce and Erica, cowering under Elaine’s baleful glare.
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This show is full of glares and stares, expressive of bottled feelings that lack impact when they are finally voiced. A history of non-communication was passed down the generations, along with poor taste in men and a haphazard approach to contraception. Each daughter thought her mother remote and absent. Neither realised what the older woman struggled with.
The pivotal crisis that prompted the family to leave Guyana is fumbled and unclear. The angry exchanges become circular. A running gag, that the women of the family were cursed by an “obeah woman”, feels forced.
It's still a pleasure to watch two fine female actors fencing with razor sharp dialogue in the early scenes, which Linton conducts with pace and focus. The back walls of Alex Berry’s box-like set carry projections of a kitschily tiled London kitchen, contrasted with the majesty of Guyana’s Kaieteur Falls. Later, the walls fill with the shadowy outlines of a legion of mothers.
Dennis-Edwards’ play takes just 80 minutes to tell us that no woman can be a superwoman. Absurdly, it feels 20 minutes too long.
Not Your Superwoman at the Bush Theatre, until 1 November, bushtheatre.co.uk.
