Hampstead Theatre – until 16 October 2021
4****
Reviewed by Claire Roderick
Hampstead Theatre’s 25th anniversary production of Shelagh Stephenson’s debut play is a stylish rollercoaster ride exploring grief, sisterhood and family secrets.
In the days before their mother’s funeral, three sisters gather in her home – the play takes place in the mother’s bedroom – and soon revert to the adolescent bickering and posturing of their youth. Their mother Vi had died with Alzheimer’s, and the loss and rewriting of memories is a constant thread throughout the play. The oldest sister Teresa (Lucy Black) runs a health food business and seems to enjoy playing the family martyr, visiting their mother as she deteriorated and organising the funeral arrangements. Middle sister Mary (Laura Rogers) is a successful doctor and Catherine (Carolina Main) lurches from one doomed relationship to another like a perpetual teenager.
Black, Rogers and Main complement each other wonderfully, equally believable in comedic or tragic scenes, and Lizzy McInnerny is a superbly spiky Vi.
The very different sisters have very different recollections of some aspects of their life and can’t quite remember who certain events actually happened to, but they all agree that their mother was a difficult woman to love and mock her acceptance of their distant father’s philandering. Some of the attitudes of these nineties’ women seem as archaic and laughable now as those of the fifties and sixties seem to the sisters, but the relationship between the three women is written brilliantly as they swerve between bitchy attacks and heartfelt concern. The arrival of Mary’s married lover Mike (Adam James) and Teresa’s husband Frank (Kulvinder Ghir) add further complications, open old wounds and reveal family secrets as the tone lurches between belly laughs, philosophising and dark, still despair. This feels a little uneven at times but reflects the fluctuating moods of grief perfectly under Alice Hamilton’s assured direction.