Evening All Afternoon with Anastasia Hille and Erin Kellyman at Donmar Warehouse – review

It begins hesitantly, with an awkward joke about joining a step class as a stepmother and stepdaughter. But as Anna Ziegler’s play unfolds, it becomes something else – a surprising and quietly powerful study of grief and families.

It’s a rare thing, a piece of storytelling that constantly surprises and never settles for the obvious – and it is wonderfully performed by Anastasia Hille and Erin Kellyman, making an astonishingly absorbing stage debut.

Hille plays Jennifer, an awkward middle-aged woman who has spent her life in thrall to her mother and has been suddenly surprised by late love, with John, a man she meets while lying sprawled on her back. “Finally, I shouted at the top of my lungs, ‘Help me!’ And someone actually heard me… and that was John and he scooped me up in more ways than one.”

Their subsequent marriage is a surprise to Jennifer, but an even greater one to John’s daughter Delilah, whose American mum had died some years before, precipitating a move to England. She cannot handle the idea that her father might have fallen in love again, with this shy, peculiar woman, not a patch on her confident, clever artist mum. Battle lines are drawn, and they deepen when Delilah’s mother starts to appear to her as a spirit and gives her advice.

Other spectres haunt the play. John never appears, yet he becomes a character through the women’s descriptions of him. So does Jennifer’s mother, with her difficult ways and her little sayings. Above them all looms Covid, a threat that is keeping families apart or thrusting them together. In Ziegler’s scenario, it brings Delilah into the family home and keeps John at work.

Ziegler is perhaps best known for Photograph 51, about the undervalued DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin, which starred Nicole Kidman when it came to the West End. Evening All Afternoon (the title comes from the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”) is a much more intimate and personal play. Gradually, scene by scene, it builds a picture of these two women, creating a sensitive study of the effects of grief, while also letting the characters develop.

Some elements seem slightly forced – the image of two female white rhinos, technically extinct – but others are beautifully apposite. On Basia Bińkowska’s serene yet isolating deep blue-painted set, everyday objects “that had stood sentry” over Jennifer’s mother’s life are spotlit by Natasha Chivers’ intense lighting. Their disappearance and placing carry a weight of meaning about the workings of memory, the value of the past and the way it interacts with the present.

For all the seriousness of its themes, the play is often very funny. Both women have the capacity to be witty and wounding as they circle one another warily. Kellyman’s Delilah is convincing in both her bolshiness and in her sense of being unmoored, grappling with feelings that she cannot quite control. The directness of her performance as Delilah softens towards Jennifer and then pulls away again is utterly compelling.

As Jennifer, Hille is like a twisted coil, all buttoned up in a brown cardigan and high-necked shirt, desperately trying not to be a doormat, to do the right thing, but battling her own demons. She brilliantly reveals how Jennifer’s own sense of inadequacy makes her walk a tightrope of sanity even as she tries to help her resistant guest.

Diyan Zora directs with a delicacy and gentleness that lets the performances and the text develop at precisely the right pace, catching the sense of suppression in the writing, as the narrative heads in many directions, gradually turning towards an unexpected and lovely sense of grace.