The Summer After Dad Died – Hen & Chickens Theatre, London

Writer and Director: Sarah Majland

A fairly traditional family melodrama, Sarah Majland’s The Summer After Dad Died has a strong character base that promises much from its knotty relationships and has considerable potential for expansion. Bringing together a set of people for a reunion of sorts who know each other too well but carry a variety of grievances has dramatic possibilities that are not fully realised in the current version playing at the Hen & Chickens Theatre. Majland’s story gets a little swept up in plot devices rather than the grief and long-held resentments between sisters that should motor this 75-minute drama.

In 1985, sisters Marianne and Tina arrive at their dad’s summer home with their respective partners Peter and Thomas to commemorate a year since his death. While waiting for their preferred half-sister Anna, the two couples squabble as marital tensions come to the fore, and Tina’s plans to travel to Africa create derision. With plenty of secrets to reveal over their few days together, the dilapidated house is not the only thing falling apart.

Majland has created a really strong scenario and, for the first few scenes, The Summer After Dad Died sails along, setting up some of the through lines that establish romantic unhappiness and personal discontents all round. At the heart of this is some really good and nicely contrasting character work with the disgruntled Marianne bickering with her selfish husband Peter over their needy baby, and particularly the free-spirited Tina, whose determination to enjoy herself and ignore her sister’s extensive griping offers a potentially interesting study of two quite different but related women.

Yet having got five characters into the house, Majland starts to lose track of their purpose, imposing a series of over-egged revelations just to destroy the harmony, but without fully seeding the breakdown of these romantic relationships or why it should happen at this moment. And this more cliched path through the story seems to sidestep the more interesting potential to understand the family itself and the very different connection the three sisters had with their father and each other – reduced to throwaway references in a hysterical final confrontation.

And it changes the purpose of The Summer After Dad Died to a tale about the less interesting men making decisions that affect their partners rather than a story that is fundamentally centred on the women, their agency and their contrasting perspectives. What does it mean to Tina and Marianne to be back in this house, surrounded by memories of a parent with whom they clearly had an ambiguous relationship? How does Anna’s presence change the dynamic and how do the sisters experience and express their complex grief? These characters are so vivid it feels a shame not to give them the space to delve into their complex history to create opportunities for conflict and solidarity across the play, leaving them alone to talk and reflect.

Performed by Halli Pattison as the petulant Marianne, an excellent Milja Marttila as Tina, and Cristina Parracho as the underdeveloped Anna, currently only a cypher for other people’s storylines, there is much more potential in Majland’s scenario than some drawn-out soapy affairs. The men are ultimately secondary, bystanders even to what should be the story of sisters and what it means to step back into a past that won’t let go of you.

Runs until 26 April 2025