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
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?
The cast juggle between multiple characters deftly but the tone is too screamy for the tension to build, and some deliveries are so fast that lines are swallowed. Several of the high moments of the play are lost to this, including Carly’s bombshell social-media rant. You glimpse a stronger, more searing play in a few scenes, such as Denise’s sabre-sharp diatribe on King Charles’s coronation (“A 74-year-old man is being showered with a billion quid’s worth of stolen bling”). But these are individual vignettes that do not gel as a whole, the action too hectic yet too long and loose.
West End |
West End |
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