Writer: Anna Ziegler
Director: Diyan Zora
American playwright Anna Ziegler is best known in the UK for Photograph 51, the 2015 play that told the story of Rosalind Franklin, a woman whose role in the discovery of DNA’s double helix had previously gone largely unrecognised. Her latest, Evening All Afternoon, is less about genetics and more about family, telling a tale of a stepmother and stepdaughter struggling to connect.
Anastasia Hille’s Jennifer is an NHS administrator who, after a life of being single, has met and is marrying a man several years her junior. This development is upsetting to her new husband’s daughter, Delilah (Erin Kellyman), who is still mourning her late mother and distrustful of the dowdy, awkward woman who has taken her place.
The pair circle each other in Basia Bińkowska’s dark blue, minimalist set, sometimes conversing, but more often addressing the audience independently of one another. These solo moments offer opportunities for character insights, particularly from Hille as she relates Jennifer’s difficult relationship with her own mother, especially as she reached later life. Ziegler crafts a woman who is very much an American view of an English Home Counties woman: stoic, humble, drily witty – but occasionally, she and Hille offer twists outside that stereotype, especially as Jennifer hacks into Delilah’s phone and emails.
Kellyman, making her stage debut after some high-profile film and TV roles, impresses as the younger woman. There is a feeling that Delilah, still caught up in the memories of being with the mother she loved, is caught being the teenager she was back then. Certainly, the sarcastic, difficult attitude she takes with Jennifer’s attempts to bond feels more like that of a child.
The introduction of a mystical element – Delilah talks of encountering her mother’s ghost, who encourages her to see Jennifer as an antagonistic cuckoo in the nest – doesn’t bring a huge amount to the tale. If anything, it diminishes the agency of a character who is entitled to feel her feelings without any supernatural incentive. There are several other devices which similarly feel like they detract from, rather than enhance, the actors’ interactions. The set includes a revolve that occasionally illustrates the characters’ distance from one another’s points of view, even though both women are more than capable of expressing that themselves.
As is the case with so many plays that have taken a few years to come to the stage, there is a Covid-related subplot that sees the two women share a home in lockdown, forcing them together. That device feels more natural than some of Ziegler and Zora’s other techniques to force the women together. It also provides a more believable justification for Delilah’s father’s absence than elsewhere, where the prolonged interactions between the two women without the man they have in common feel overly contrived.
That said, the emotional dynamics between Jennifer and Delilah are delicately and movingly explored. Hille’s portrayal of a fundamentally nice woman finding herself unaccustomed to assuming a parental role is filled with charm and grace notes. Beside her, Kellyman shines as the obstreperous Delilah in what will hopefully be the first of many stage appearances. Evening All Afternoon covers familiar familial tensions, maybe not with buckets of originality, but with plenty of evocative charm.
Runs until 11 April 2025
