Soho Theatre Upstairs – until 2nd March 2024
Reviewed by Celia Armand Smith
4****
When writer Katie Redford created Wish You Weren’t Here in collaboration with the Theatre Centre, she held workshops with the hundreds of teenagers and young people. They were asked about their interests, concerns, loves, and losses, and while the big issues like climate change and gender were raised, they always came back to the relationships between them and their mums. This formed the foundation for Wish You Weren’t Here – a teenage girl and her mum.
Lorna (Eleanor Henderson) and Mila (Olivia Pentelow) are in Scarborough to celebrate Mila’s GCSE results, and to relive memories from the near and distant past. Mila’s recollections centre around spending time on the beach with her Nan, so it’s only right that, much to the surprise of her mum, she whip out a sandwich bag of her Nan’s ashes in a Wetherspoons. Lorna remembers teenage romances with Jez/Jaz/Baz at the arcade and hopes to reignite that particular flame. The pair navigate what it is to be a responsible teenager and a mum who just wants to have fun, social media use, politics, body image, and the expectations of parent child relationships.
Mila is sulky and sarcastic and would rather be with her mates celebrating in London, and Lorna is a call centre worker resentful of her friends who all have newborns and perfect Instagram lives. The relationship is mirrored yet fractured, and full of love and pain. Under the direction of Rob Watt, Henderson and Pentelow are hilarious, touching, and heartbreaking in their portrayal of the mother and daughter. The set designed by Bethany Wells is minimal but clever, using different height platforms that stand in for tables, beds, cliff tops and dance machines, and three TV screens playing snippets of the news and scenes from beaches and arcades. Perfect for when the play tours schools.
The teenage role is so well researched that instead of being the one voice of a kid struggling with with life, it’s the suffering of a whole generation. A weight that is at times too huge for this one hour play. It is however refreshing that young people are given an authentic voice that is often assumed and outdated in this enjoyable play about the complexities of family ties.