Evangeline, played by Cathy Tyson, was born in Trinidad and came to England with her young husband shortly after they were married. She still hankers after the hot sun and the smells and tastes of the land of her birth. When success eluded her husband, and he became ever more bitter and disappointed, she wanted to return. But his pride stopped them.
Now he’s gone and Evangeline is reduced to sitting day after day at draughty London Bridge station selling copies of the Big Issue, a frail figure with a ramrod-straight back and a faded elegance. She survives on the kindness of strangers, and when a passing young woman calls her “mother” the memories of her own lost daughter, Shirley (Chereen Buckley), come flooding back. But a question surfaces in Michelle Inniss’s play: was it the daughter who abandoned her mother or the mother who abandoned her daughter? And are the mistakes of the past always doomed to be repeated?
Tyson has had a long career working on TV, in films including Mona Lisa, and more recently with theatre-maker Chris Goode on shows including Monkey Bars and Stand. This show is the first with a new company, Pitch Lake, which Tyson has founded to address the lack of leading roles in British theatre for black and minority-ethnic mid-career actors, women in particular.
It certainly gives Tyson a meaty part. She succeeds in lending sympathy to Evangeline even as it gradually emerges that her devotion to the two men in her life – her husband and God – have had an adverse impact on the life of the daughter who walked out of the family home as a teenager when her mother refused to recognise the truth of what was happening to her.
This is a debut play and it often shows, particularly in the awkward plotting and the way that it can’t quite confront Evangeline’s culpability. But for all its flaws it has a big heart and the use of the Trinbago vernacular is richly effective, lending it poetry without a hint of prissiness.
Cara Nolan’s production is a trifle stilted and hampered by an ugly design, but this is an evening that brings different and distinctive voices to the stage and Tyson and Buckley ensure that you always want to find out whether rapprochement is possible for these two damaged women.
