Review: THE TYLER SISTER, Hampstead Theatre

Hampstead Theatre opens the new year with a heartwarming but generally forgettable play on their smaller stage. The Tyler Sisters follows three girls as they grow up and find their place in the world from 1990 to 2030. What the audience gets to see of this time frame in the life of normal women, who might not like each other all the time but who are bound by blood, is a series of single scenes for each one of the 40 years.

Written by Alexandra Wood and directed by Abigail Graham, the piece paints the true-to-form inner workings of sisterhood, but is just not interesting enough to fill its two hours. Maddy (Caroline Faber), Katrina (Angela Griffin), and Gail (Bryony Hannah) are reasonably quirky people (especially Katrina), but aren't compelling characters. They're those mates you love to bits but whose lives wouldn't make a good play, essentially.

It's sweet to see how their personalities grow and their allegiances shift in time while they become self-assured and complicated mothers and wives, but Wood doesn't explore the possibilities of their depths. The scenes she chooses to represent the different years are often shallow and don't bring the plot forward, let alone be emblematic of their progression as characters as well as human beings. There's the occasional clever bit here and there, but these instances are too far apart to hold the weight of a full-length show.

Regrettably, Graham's direction comes off as nearly nonexistent. A television screen sets the time and place of our yearly appointmen with the sisters as if it were feeding stage directions to the crowd; the action that follows this Get Out of Jail Free gimmick is a frantic race without a pause to reflect. Major life experiences are brushed off quickly and Wood prefers to address the core events by talking about what happens on the outskirts rather than tackling them directly, which, in theory, would be a great idea but gets lost among the nothingness of the play.

The second acts is somehow more hands on than the first and finally gives its public - and its actresses - something substantial to chew on. Faber, Griffin, and Hannah show the potential to be sensational actresses, but get lots in the cheap humour and lack of meticulous directing. They create idiosyncratic characters, giving physical personality to quite generalised - therefore very universal - examples of women.

A long turquoise room designed by Naomi Kuyck-Cohen becomes everything from their childhood home to Spain and France with Joshua Gadsby's lighting design. The latter does commendable work building a picturesque shadow play that, however, are slightly lost within the tone of the production.

The intent is clearly there, but the spark is too feeble to start a fire. It's lovely to see a celebration of sisterhood of this kind, but the absence of traction in the direction and a less-than-gripping pace don't help the dissatisfying and humdrum writing. The Tyler Sisters is unfortunately inconsequential, but perhaps that's exactly its reason for existing. As Ricky Gervais said a couple of nights ago at the Golden Globes ceremony: "We're all going to die soon and there's no sequel".

The Tyler Sisters runs at Hampstead Theatre until 18 Jannuary.

Production photo courtesy of Robert Day

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