Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford – until 18 May 2019
Reviewed by Antonia Hebbert
3 ***
It was hard to get into this play to begin with. There’s a devout mother, Luda, chopping onions and talking to God. She has three daughters, factory worker Tina, schoolgirl Francesca, and Vita, who is shut up in a convent for reasons that are obscure to begin with. They’re an Italian migrant family, living in Brooklyn in 1960. They’re all struggling in different ways, but you wonder how these different threads are going to be pulled together. Then Nic, the father of the family appears and suddenly the play hits a different stride.
He is played by Robert Cavanah, who is positively alarming as a man who expresses his unhappiness as cruelty to his family. The sense of rage just under the surface (and sometimes exploding) sets the drama alight. All the other actors seem to respond to this and become more three-dimensional as we see just how hard it is to stand up to someone so manipulative. He regrets having left Naples for New York, and his misery is holding back the rest of the family. Madeleine Worrall is convincing as Luda, the wife and mother with torn loyalties. Georgia May Foote sparkles as Vita, the daughter who has ended up in a convent with broken bones. Hannah Bristow (Francesca) and Laurie Ogden are sweet (maybe too sweet) as the teenage friends who want to run away together, and Bristow comes into her own when she finally lets rip. The growing friendship between Tina (Mona Goodwin) and her workmate Celia (Gloria Onitiri) is very well conveyed. Stephen Hogan is charming and kindly as the shopkeeper who offers Luda kindness and a possible way out.
The pivotal moment of the play is a plane falling out of the sky, which really did happen in Brooklyn in December 1960. Playwright Meghan Kennedy remembers her mother talking about the event, and has based the play around it, and her family’s struggle to survive as immigrants. It feels authentic. There’s an appealing, very simple set of kitchen table and bed, which tips up to become a backdrop for factory and outdoor scenes. (They could maybe have tried a bit harder with the factory – I got distracted by the inefficiency of loading a cardboard box on a chair). After slightly wobbly start, this became a very intense, moving and absorbing drama.