There are two sides to every story.
Grieving the loss of the family shop with their dreams destroyed, Denise
and daughter-in-law Carly and left to pick up the pieces of their relatives’
mistakes.
Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Erin Doherty play Denise and Carly in this
thought-provoking drama that exp
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/1d428e6c-db5d-46c2-8258-70f038868b71 In the previous plays, Thomas Coombes and Paapa Essiedu played brilliantly in the round, spinning and gambolling with manic eye contact to engage the whole audience. Doherty and Duncan-Brewster are no less charismatic and compelling, but the points when the pair turn in and interact are like a vortex, sucking the attention away from the viewer. It doesn’t help that the banter, delivered at volume and high velocity, is sometimes hard to catch. At 100 minutes (no interval) the play could last half as long again if the pair weren’t chatting at warp speed. It’s an extraordinary feat of stamina and agility nonetheless.
It is fascinating to watch Carly and Denise mark out their respective territory in opposing diagonal corners of the stage, as if they are boxers preparing for a fight. In myriad ways they are precisely this, as they gradually recount their own versions of events of business disaster. This is a frustratingly centrifugal narrative, with long digressions into past events of often dubious relevance; the protracted account of a fraught family viewing of the King’s coronation left me twitching in frustration. What, we long to know, sounded the death knell for the shared space that housed Carly’s flower shop and Denise’s West Indian café?
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