The past hangs heavy over Sarah Whitehead’s full-length debut, but despite being set after a mother’s death, it is less about grief than about reckoning. The three sisters who gather in the family home in Liverpool are refreshingly matter of fact about their bereavement. Their loss is a prompt to reflect, bicker and pick at old wounds, but happily, it is not an excuse to be maudlin.
Whitehead is too witty a writer for that. Whether it is Mona (Jessica May Buxton) operating a chat line for people who get off on astronomy, Kelly (Katie Erich) being banned from Deliveroo or a running joke about a narcissistic priest, Pass the Parcel bubbles with quirky detail. Besides, the sisters know each other too well to get sentimental, even if they do enjoy raking up old grievances.
A sometime Guardian contributor, the playwright has written in the past about her grandmother being kept in the dark about her adoption. Her great-grandmother, meanwhile, claimed to be psychic. Whitehead abstracts those ideas – a traumatic family secret and the gift of second sight – to fashion a drama in which Lindsay (Hayley Sheen) is forced to recalibrate her past during a spooky round of pass the parcel.
In this, the play positions itself somewhere between the sisterly mourning of Shelagh Stephenson’s The Memory of Water and the raucous Catholic superstition of Des Dillon’s Six Black Candles. In front of a backdrop by Eleanor Ferguson that, depending on your frame of mind, represents either the layers of a wrapped-up parcel or the folds of a clitoris, Nicole Behan’s female-centred production explores the tensions between daughters, mothers and sisters, weighing freedom against responsibility, adventure against home.
With a jolly cameo by Eithne Browne as family friend Pamela, equal parts devout and impious, and doing a mean karaoke Patsy Cline, it is a warmly acted production that captures the contradictions of close relationships. If the writing can be small-scale and televisual, Whitehead also builds a vivid sense of the offstage characters, be it Lindsay’s growing son Alex or the older generation whose actions continue to define the lives of the sisters even in their absence.
At the Royal Court, Liverpool, until 8 February
