Steph (Kerry Wilson-Parry) and Kay (Roberta Kerr) are sisters in law. They are not close, are very different women and have been relatively estranged for years. Following the funeral of Bob/Robert – Steph’s brother and Kay’s husband, they find themselves in Kay’s middle class, middle England drawing room where both tensions and whisky flow and where family secrets emerge and shocking revelations are made.
Presented in a naturalist style, designer Rachel Dennis recreates the tastefully bland home of the smugly comfortable. If you like a dado rail and a decanter clad drinks cabinet you’ll be happy as the proverbial pig.
Wilson-Parry is engaging and vibrant as Steph, Bob’s younger sister. Having been born and raised into an aristocratic family, surrounded by nannies and privilege she became pregnant at the age of 15 and suffered the brutal indignity of being sent away to birth and then abandon her child. Once done, she is bundled back to school to pretend nothing happened and to carry the burden of her family’s judgement and disappointment for the rest of her life. She is charming, flaky, manipulative, irresponsible and entitled and Wilson-Parry offers a well-rounded performance which carries the energy and pace of the piece with skill.
As Kay, the northern, working-class girl made good and career driven, no nonsense widow of Robert, Kerr presents a controlled, prickly, business-like woman, who is initially hard to gauge. Clearly she is not at her best, she just buried her husband and her desire to be left alone to grieve is easily understood. She is a woman who appears to be holding it together until she is allowed the space to let it go and this tension juxtaposes well with the energy of her somewhat cuckoo-like sister in law.
And so the narrative unfolds. Devastating secrets are gradually revealed and whilst the structure of these blows works very well as they emerge and the end point of each act, there were for me, questions about timelines that did not add up. It wasn’t until the third act that we learned that the year was 2020. I found myself doing the mental maths to work out Steph’s age. If she had joined a hippy commune following her A levels and ended up resident n Greenham Common Women’s Camp during the 1980s she must be at least in her mid-seventies at the start of this current decade and I struggled to believe the woman in front of me was anywhere near this age. As Steph reveals her truths, every one of which is a nuclear blow to Kay, it begins to feel a little too much – almost like an Eastenders special, but with better soft furnishings.
The gradual shift of power from one woman to the other is successfully reflected in Sue Jenkins’ direction but the final blow goes so far that it results in one woman dumping the consequences of a vile, disgusting, duplicitous man onto his unknowing widow with no concern or care for the impact of her misdirected bile on that woman, a woman she herself has deceived for several decades. So much for sisterhood!
Reviewer: Lou Kershaw
Reviewed: 30th October 2024
North West End UK Rating: