Review: WE HAD A WORLD, Hampstead Theatre

On her deathbed, US playwright Joshua Harmon’s grandmother granted him permission to write a play about their family, on the condition that it be as “brutal and vitriolic” as possible. The result is We Had A World, a Pandora’s Box of generational trauma – indeed, the actor playing Harmon begins by opening up a literal box.

Ryan Kopel plays Harmon all the way from childlike wonder, to teenage stroppiness, to a mellow sense of self-reflection in his thirties. Rounding out the cast are his practical suburban mother Ellen (Anna Francolini) and his Upper East Side grandmother Renee (Suzanne Bertish). This is no epic family saga; the playwright seems concerned with who this trio are and how they relate to one another, rather than what might have happened in the past to make them that way.

Renee is the connoisseur who gave Harmon artistic aspirations, taking him to Broadway shows and museums as soon as he could walk (“I was nine, I didn’t yet have a grasp on the concept of fisting,” he says after she takes him to a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit). Ellen, by contrast, is the archetypal no-nonsense Jewish mother, too busy for therapy and ever at pains to conceal her Brooklyn accent.

But the spectre of Renee’s alcoholism, her abuse and neglect of her daughter and her attempt to rectify this with her grandson, gradually comes into focus. Harmon in the play is left to mediate between his childhood recollections of his grandmother and the painful inheritance she has left him.

Harmon the writer is preoccupied by the idea of memory, and there are clear traces of that other unreliably narrated family recollection, The Glass Menagerie, but here the narrator is more self-aware. The onstage version of Harmon is forever rolling the tapes on his own life, wondering whether a funny story was really tragic, and replaying the same scene with alternate endings. This conceit is elegantly directed by Josh Seymour, with the same sense of ambiguity that he brought to last year’s flashback-heavy Ragdoll.

Various other unseen spouses and siblings and cousins lurk around the edges of the play, without ever taking up narrative space; this story relies on the trio being narrowly, obsessively concerned with themselves and each other. An additional conflict that led to Ellen going decades without speaking to her sister simmers painfully in the background, but is never completely explained, another thread everyone onstage is afraid to unravel.

But there’s an extent to which all this is self-indulgent. Harmon seems enamoured of the idea of writing a play about the playwriting process, constantly having his cast discuss what may or may not make it into the play, and even having his fictional self hand out scripts at one point. So much time – the show runs at an uninterrupted hour and 45 minutes – is spent on hammering home the metatheatrical premise, that the actual climax of the drama, when the family conflict escalates to physical violence, doesn’t feel as climactic as it should.

Even more unsubtle is the giant melting ice cube at the back of the set, as though the show’s political commentary on the responsibility of the old towards the young needed spelling out. Far more effective is the scene of abject climate denial from Renee, one of the moments where we most overtly sense that her aloofness and whimsy can spill over into narcissism.

The psychological meat of the relationships between the three characters is sturdy enough to stand on its own. Harmon has much potential here to work with and clearly has the willingness to take a zoom lens to his own family, but he needs to be less sidetracked by innovations to the form along the way.

We Had A World plays at Hampstead Theatre until 4 July