When It Happens to You at Park Theatre – review

Tawni O’Dell’s engrossing play is a theatrical memoir of trauma suffused with anger and regret, but also significant amounts of redemptive love and hope. It’s a true story, depicting the fallout from the rape of O’Dell’s daughter, the effects of this (“the crime doesn’t fade, it metastasises!”) on the family, and the journey of self-destruction many victims set out on. Equal parts exorcism, reflection and didactic oral history, When It Happens to You has a commendable lack of sensationalism and surprising levels of humour, some of it wincingly jet-black.

An acclaimed American novelist, O’Dell’s writing for the theatre (she actually played herself in the piece’s 2019 Off-Broadway premiere) is pithy and relatable. There’s an urgency to her storytelling that is perfectly matched by Jez Bond’s stylish, sensitive staging which is austere and still when it needs to be, but more often characterised by a whirling, restless theatricality that stimulates but never enervates.

Ironically though, the emotional authenticity that gives the piece its piquancy also robs it of a certain amount of dramatic tension. Although every aspect of the writing, production and perhaps especially the performances, hits the mark, there’s an inescapable feeling at times that we are being told a story, albeit one related by an uncommonly engaging narrator, rather than watching a fully-fledged play.

The initial scenes, where Tawni (renamed Tara for the stage and played with stupendous range and commitment by Amanda Abbington) receives a 3am phone call from her distraught daughter (Rosie Day) and heads straight to New York to support her child and navigate a surfeit of legal red tape, played out with the pace of a thriller. It’s bleakly, nastily funny too, as Abbington juxtaposes Tara’s cool, efficient exterior with the roiling distress and fury underneath. Then the last quarter of the play, ignited by a revelation that initially startles then illuminates much of what we’ve been watching, is very moving: Tara drops, with an affecting mixture of grief and controlled fury, lamentable figures and facts about sexual violations of women by men. It’s strong stuff, but the script is slightly marred by a baggy middle section where the tension and energy of the writing briefly dip.

Abbington is magnificent though. Resilient and witty, until trauma and guilt thrust those positive attributes out of her reach, she has an emotional availability that feels completely organic, and a commanding presence that is both reassuring and formidable. She’s the beating heart of the show. Day’s Esme is terrific too, her stooped posture, vacant eyes and lifeless, hanging arms capturing with heartbreaking accuracy the body language of somebody who has pretty much given up. Her outbursts of anger are frighteningly convincing.

Miles Molan projects unerringly the self-absorption and privilege of her gifted older brother, but also the stricken horror when he realises the damage men can wreak upon women. The quartet of fine actors is completed by Tok Stephen, delivering beautifully subtle, detailed contrasts between a kind but not-overly sensitive police officer, and the new man in Tara’s life. Interestingly, the father of her grown-up kids is barely referred to.

Jez Bond’s production fuses the technical elements (Melanie Wilson’s omnipresent, discreetly threatening sound score and Sherry Coenen’s fast-changing neon lighting states are particularly persuasive) into a satisfying whole. Zahra Mansouri sets it in a muted, elegant void, suggestive both of moneyed urbane living and the slightly unsettling landscape of a dream.

When It Happens to You succeeds in negotiating the tricky middle ground between being harrowing and compulsively watchable. It ends on a hopeful note that feels borne of reality and maturity, rather than the understandable desire not to send audiences home feeling utterly depressed. This is a meaty, accomplished piece of theatre, distinguished by a towering central performance.