Review: EVENING ALL AFTERNOON, Donmar Warehouse

“What a thing to have a mother!” That’s how Anna Ziegler’s new play ends. Studies show that it takes two to five years for a blended family to become a cohesive unit, and when Jennifer marries John, his daughter Delilah refuses to cooperate. Jennifer badly wants to be in Delilah’s life. In her fifties, she’s never been married nor had any romantic liaisons before, but the young woman struggles to reconcile her devotion to her late mother with the recent addition to her world. Ziegler introduces two women who struggle with change. They’re extremely different, but, unsurprisingly, very much the same. 

Evening All Afternoon (a title taken from a Wallace Stevens poem) is thematically solid, with plenty of tonal quirks and delightful twists of dry, humourless humour - but it's also very average. It wants to be a heartfelt plea, a warning of the passage of time, and a heart-rendering story of acceptance all in one. Diyan Zora strips down the direction to the minimum denomination, placing the pair in a liminal space awash in blue (Basia Bińkowska). The visuals are relatively still: when the actors aren’t monologising directly to the audience (isolated but not secluded by Natasha Chivers’s lights), sharing their reflections and observations, they face one another on top of a revolving stage, spinning slowly, fidgety and uncomfortable.

Anastasia Hille’s eyes are almost permanently cast down, her hands clasped at her front, self-deprecating and caustic in her worldview. Her Jennifer is instantly intriguing: her opinion of herself is simultaneously excellent and derogatory. She unflinchingly says that she has nothing to offer to others, yet she is confident in her identity. Prudish and awkward, she has a firm hand. Her displays of affection could come off as calculated, but they’re genuine attempts at love.

On the other side of the ring, Erin Kellyman is perfectly Gen Z. She hides Delilah’s pain behind a façade of snappiness and displeasure, her petulance bouncing back against Jennifer’s deference, unable to breach it. Everything is fair game (Jennifer’s loneliness, her beliefs, her relationship with her family) and her jabs are painfully pointed. Ziegler tries to remain impartial by dividing the stage time equally between the duo, but it’s evident that this is about Jennifer and Delilah is there as mere foil.

The subject matter is a mixed bag that covers societal judgement, mental health, motherhood, death, anger, solitude, and even Covid. The context and background of Ziegler’s exploration of loss transpires from the characters’ remarks as they try to navigate their current reality. The fluctuations in tone set an engaging pace that’s hurried by one-liners and pleasant quips, and slowed by the emphases in Adam Cork’s sound design. While the writing is compelling, too much is left up in the air for the public to take at face value.

We’re not saying that the choices made by Ziegler should be over-explained or justified more, but (spoiler alert!) we think that something as distressing as a psychotic breakdown should be given a bit more weight. Jennifer and Delilah’s relationship has an episodic feel to it, and Jennifer seeks to relate her own experiences to Delilah’s in order to understand her better. The individual points of view of the single monologues become a double-edged sword: we’re offered a direct window into the characters’ minds, but we don’t get to see the bigger picture. The intricacies of their day-to-day behaviours aren’t portrayed from the outside enough to appreciate the evolution of their bond.

The result is a highly personal account of a knotty situation. It strives to present a universal look at the precarity of life and the need to connect with other people, but it tries a little too hard. Ultimately, the script is too comfortable to have any impact. It uses slight comedy to assuage rather than diving into the necessary moral compromises of filling an absence, so grief is in danger of becoming an accessory. The production is sleek and the acting is exquisite, but the narrative is commonplace and the considerations are elementary.

Evening All Afternoon runs at The Donmar Warehouse until 11 April.