Two screen stars blaze on stage in this mother-daughter drama: Letitia Wright, of Black Panther fame, captivates as the Gen Z daughter, Erica, while Golda Rosheuvel, from Bridgerton, is minx-ish as her emotionally remote mother, Joyce.
If only Emma Dennis-Edwards’s script were as nimble and compelling. It begins with a flight to Guyana, in comic mode, and travels towards themes of trauma, motherhood and healing that bring broad-brush dialogue, therapy-speak and earnestness.
The women are on their way to the Caribbean island to scatter the ashes of Elaine – Joyce’s mother and Erica’s grandmother. Together they comprise three generations of British Guyanese women who have had to go it alone, from work to child-rearing to financial and emotional support. It examines the cost of that but also how daughters misunderstand, and misjudge, their mothers.
Both actors are at ease on stage. Wright is most magnetic while Rosheuvel is heartwarming and playful, albeit emotionally impenetrable to her daughter, even at her character’s most vulnerable.
It is energetically directed by Lynette Linton, who is co-creator along with Dennis-Edwards, while Alex Berry’s set pulses with light, sound and projection as the story zooms across memories and time-frames.
Mother and daughter are chalk-and-cheese with an amusingly antsy repartee at first: Joyce seems to be living her Shirley Valentine dreams as she kicks back, eyes up the waiter and hits the booze while Erica glowers at her judgingly and reassesses her own relationship to alcohol.
The gulf between them has a history of secret anguish which emerges from beneath the humour, but without enough emotional intricacy or depth. Flashbacks to private sadness, depression and loss are well-enacted, in quick temporal switches, but they are too brief, with a repetition of ideas and lines through the play.
Both actors switch between playing Elaine and versions of their own character at different ages, but the story brings plot-points that do not amount to much – the discovery of a long lost father that goes nowhere and an early memory for Joyce that haunts her but remains opaque until the end.
This venue has had a spate of charismatic two-handers under Linton’s leadership such as The P Word and Shifters. This does not have the same alchemy, despite its central, dynamic duo, whose performances outshine the play.
