'Evening All Afternoon' review — Anna Ziegler’s healing play about mothers and daughters

Read our review of Evening All Afternoon, now in performances at the Donmar Warehouse to 11 April.

Summary

• Anna Ziegler's play makes its world premiere at the Donmar Warehouse
• The play follows a British boomer and her American step-daughter as they navigate a tricky relationship
• Anastasia Hille stars alongside Erin Kellyman in her stage debut

Mothers and daughters, and the painfully complex relationship between them, was the subject of a play at the Donmar Warehouse exactly a year ago – and we're seeing something similar again at the same venue. If Anna Mackmin’s Backstroke reopened old wounds and tipped a fair amount of salt into them, Anna Ziegler’s Evening All Afternoon – receiving its world premiere – heals and seals them. Of course, the two aren’t really companion plays, and their twin timing (over Mother’s Day) is surely no more than a coincidence, but there are uncanny similarities in their themes, all-female casts, and the relegation of male characters to floating offstage presences that feel, if nothing else, worth mentioning.

Ziegler’s reportorial play absents everyone else from the frame entirely to hone in on the conflicting experiences of British boomer Jennifer (Anastasia Hille) and her American Gen Z step-daughter Delilah (Erin Kellyman). While the two reflect on their relationships with their respective biological mothers, it’s really their own tricky, forced union we’re watching. The glue is Delilah’s widowed father, who brought these two unlikely parties together when he married Jennifer, and the play is really their figuring things out – through plenty of surly boundary-testing on Delilah’s part, and much pandering on Jennifer’s.

The title is a nod to the opening line of Wallace Stevens’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, and like the poem, a core theme here is how different personal perspectives shape individual senses of reality. Jennifer and Delilah struggle to see eye-to-eye at first, but slowly trust builds as their perspectives begin to align.

Both characters are wonderfully flawed creations, and it’s simultaneously moving and wryly funny watching them muddle their way through. Ziegler’s zippy dialogue is shot through with dark wit, and the awkwardly spiky exchanges between her chalk and cheese characters are always entertaining in director Diyan Zora’s production. It’s also very well cast: Hille is superb as the prim, skittish Jennifer, whose obsessive neatness and penchant for snooping would grate on any 20-something. Screen actor Kellyman (28 Years Later, Top Boy), in her stage debut, is a pleasing counterbalance as the scathing, uncompromising Delilah.

But it’s an unremarkable story and the turn-taking monologues start to feel tediously self-indulgent towards the end of the play's 90-minute run-time. It also doubles up as a passé Covid drama: to varying extents, the pair find themselves going mad from being holed up together in a strange and newly uncertain world. Thankfully, there’s also a thread of magical realism: Delilah’s visits from her dead mother spice things up and add welcome intrigue – especially when this spectre reveals a wicked bent.

Basia Bińkowska’s abstract set also lends it some much-needed mysticism. A deep blue expanse dwarfs the women and hints at the internal loneliness that can prevail even when you’re in company. Natasha Chivers’s lighting suspends solo bulbs above this space, and they too appear isolated. One orb cleverly becomes Delilah’s mother’s spirit, glowing with an otherworldly quality and sparking when it feels vexed. And the stage floor revolves in an on-the-nose reminder we’re watching two versions of reality orbiting one another.

But after a suspenseful build up, a jump forward in time paves the way for a resolution we didn’t see develop. I suspect the final scene will be received like Marmite: cloyingly insincere or profoundly heartwarming.

Evening All Afternoon is at the Donmar Warehouse to 11 April.

Photo credit: Anastasia Hille and Erin Kellyman in Evening All Afternoon. (Photos by Marc Brenner)