Anna Ziegler’s world premiere two-hander arrives at the Donmar trailing the kind of critical warmth that tends to get spritzed about liberally on opening nights, and it would be churlish to pretend there isn’t something here. It would also be wrong to pretend there’s quite enough.
The play is a drama, part domestic portrait, part psychological study, set across the Covid lockdown years. Jennifer, a buttoned-up Englishwoman in her fifties who has spent most of her adult life caring for her late, domineering mother, has improbably found love with John, a man some years her junior. She now finds herself sharing a house with Delilah, his university-age American daughter, whose own Jamaican-born mother died when Delilah was young. The two women are yoked together by bereavement, circumstance, and a mutual inability to make each other feel remotely welcome.
Ziegler’s script, it must be said, is disciplined and occasionally sharp, with a good ear for the particular English mode of aggression that presents itself as helpfulness. Jennifer’s early offer of a silver tray – telling Delilah to take it back to the jeweller’s and buy herself something she actually wants – lands as unintentional cruelty dressed up as generosity. There are other moments like this, dry and well-observed, and they are the evening’s best. The problem is that Ziegler clearly believes the play is sadder and more tender than it actually is. It aims for something quietly devastating and achieves something more like quietly inert. Themes of grief, blended family, mental health, Covid, and the extinction of the northern white rhino are all gestured with varying degrees of follow-through. Not everything gets past the headline stage.
Anastasia Hille, playing Jennifer, is the production’s most genuinely interesting achievement. With eyes almost permanently cast downward and hands clasped at her front as though she might otherwise cause damage, she makes Jennifer a woman so comprehensively hollowed out by decades of self-effacement that her attempts at warmth read as something closer to an emergency procedure. It is a very precise and rather remarkable piece of acting, the kind where you understand a whole life from the way someone stands. Whether Jennifer constitutes a fully satisfying dramatic character is another question, Ziegler gives Hille a woman to inhabit rather than a journey to play, but inhabit her she does, completely.
As Delilah, Erin Kellyman arrives trailing the notices of a screen career and duly delivers a stage debut that is technically assured and never less than watchable. The issue, and it is a meaningful one for a two-hander that runs eighty-five minutes, is that Delilah as written is so comprehensively closed off, so relentlessly ungiving, that watching Kellyman work is a bit like watching someone very competently portray a gap in the room. This is the character Ziegler has written, and Kellyman performs her faithfully. Whether faithfully serving a character who is deliberately personality-free constitutes a triumph depends on your view of what theatre is for.
Director Diyan Zora strips the staging back to near-nothing. Basia Bińkowska’s design offers a blue-washed expanse, a slow revolve, and a handful of descending light bulbs that serve variously as atmosphere and metaphor. When Natasha Chivers’s lighting isolates these bulbs above the actors, the effect is striking, and a sequence using shadows to suggest fractured states of mind is genuinely inventive – the production’s visual high-water mark. What the stage cannot do is manufacture the emotional charge that the text has not quite earned. The revolve turns, the bulbs descend, and you wait for something to move you. By the time Ziegler reaches for her ending, a jump forward in time that arrives with more resolution than the preceding eighty minutes have warranted, you may find yourself simply grateful that the whole exercise lasted no longer than it did.
There is a version of this play that would make you cry. This is not quite it.
