Writer: Joshua Harmon
Director: Josh Seymour
The Hampstead Theatre’s main space recently revived Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, a play about the imperfection of recall, the subjectivity of truth, and the difficulty of reconstructing a shared understanding of the past. The same concerns animate Joshua Harmon’s intimate, loosely constructed, and intensely personal memory play, We Had a World, currently showing in the venue’s downstairs studio. Both ostentatiously play with form, but the comparison between the two pieces should not be pushed too far. Frayn’s concerns are mostly intellectual and philosophical; Harmon’s are broadly familial and emotional. What is striking, however, is the extent to which each playwright requires their audiences to join them in reconstructing reality from a dusty Pandora’s box of contested memories.
“It’s all so angry, and it’s all so stupid” is how playwright Joshua (Ryan Kopel), an autobiographical stand-in for Harmon himself, describes the years of painful and often trivial conflict between his charismatic alcoholic grandmother, Renee (Suzanne Bertish, part self-absorbed detachment, part lovable rascal), and his mother, Ellen (Anna Francolini, wounded, defensive, but warm, too). Harmon gives us a parent and child where minor grievances become repositories for much larger emotional needs. Of course, many families are like this, which one supposes is Harmon’s point.
Renee is the kind of comfortably off Upper East Side grandmother who dons a fake British accent and takes her young grandson to Mike Leigh films and a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition: “I was only nine. I didn’t yet grasp the concept of fisting”, the mature, reflective Joshua tells us. “Would you ever kill your own children?” the pre-teen Joshua muses after Nana, confidante, companion and object of fascination, takes him to a production of Medea. “It would depend”, she replies. One can see why, growing up gay with a love of theatre and pretensions to be an actor, Joshua loves the funny, compelling, eccentric woman to bits. Indeed, at one level, We Had a World can be seen as a gay writer’s attempt to understand the powerful women who shaped him, perhaps a reason why various siblings, cousins and a grandfather remain unseen in the background.
But as Harmon summarises late on, rather too explicitly, “Women who should not have been mothers make great grandmothers”. Renee’s secret, which Joshua only learns when he is 15, is that Nana is a lush. Ellen’s childhood was pretty hellish at times. “I’d come home from school and find her in a pool of vomit”. Ellen and her now-estranged sister, Susan (we never really find out the reason for their alienation), often have to parent their own mother, though Ellen does all the heavy lifting. No wonder she is so angry. Her rage drives her to a successful legal career, comfort in her Jewish traditions, a stoic refusal to go to therapy, and a determination that Joshua will never see his grandmother drunk.
Harmon jumps years or even decades between scenes. Joshua’s memories – of childhood, teenage angst, whiny studenthood, and mature mediation – trigger contradictory accounts of the same events from Ellen and Renee. Director Josh Seymour handles the shifts deftly, happy to let the ambiguity in Harmon’s writing speak for itself and aided by impeccable performances all round.
Harmon and designer Sarah Beaton’s motivation in placing a melting block of ice on a plinth at the rear of the stage invites speculation. Joshua cites the climate crisis as a guiding preoccupation in his life, but perhaps the point here is that we are all living with the consequences of our forbears’ actions and inactions.
We Had a World is, as Joshua puts it in one of many direct, playwright-to-audience addresses, “a small family drama”. The deathbed scene (it takes an overlong hour and 45 minutes to get there) sees one character ask the other, “Why didn’t you call me back?” The question is a cipher for bigger, more existential preoccupations: ‘Did you ever really love me?’ and ‘Was I ever really important to you?’. The narratorial meta-theatrics often irk, and the conflict can be repetitive, but Harmon delivers plenty of laughs and gets squabbling families spot-on. Emotionally, the play packs a hefty punch, too, and you may struggle to hold off on tears late on.
Runs until 4 July 2026
