Review: DIXON AND DAUGHTERS, National Theatre

Co-produced by Clean Break, the organisation working with women with lived experience of the criminal justice system or at risk of entering it, Dixon and Daughters offers a powerful perspective on the decisions that can shape our lives.

Mary (Brid Brennan) is coming home to Yorkshire after a six-month prison sentence. As her daughters and granddaughter try to make her welcome, we slowly find out what dark secrets are being hidden within the paper-thin, gauzed walls of this ordinary house.

Bernie (Liz White) is the brisk and efficient older sister, the organiser; while Julie (Andrea Lowe) has just walked away from an abusive marriage and is battling a drink problem. Ella (Yazmin Kayani), Bernie's daughter, seems settled at university, but she has her own hidden issues.

Into this dynamic comes Briana (Alison Fitzjohn), Mary's stepdaughter, whose testimony condemned her to prison, and whose years of abuse at the hands of her (now dead) father have left her facing life on a literal knife edge, masking her anger within a calm exterior.

Mary's bitterness and antipathy against Briana and Julie hides many years of domestic drama and delusions, underlined by the noises and musical cues witnessed as the characters progress around Kat Heath's two-level set. With sound by Sinead Diskin and lighting by Paule Constable, Dixon and Daughters is always atmospheric without taking attention away from the plot.

Director Roisin McBrinn keeps the action moving between living room, kitchen, bedroom, stairs. This is a busy place where to stop and reflect for a second might bring too many bad memories tumbling down. Doors slam, shadows stay still, incriminating moments are hidden.

This is a story about fear, silence, and survival. While Mary resolutely refuses to face any sort of reality about her family, she forms a bond with a fellow ex-prisoner, Leigh, who despite dealing with her own trauma, seems to take on the role of Fool to Mary's Lear, offering pithy asides and manic laughter, while also needing the cocoon of a maternal figure. Notably, Mary gives up her bed to Leigh, while reacting with anger to Julie sleeping there.

A domestic drama written in 2018, but held back from performance due to the pandemic, Clean Break and Deborah Bruce's play feels a little uneven at times but has important points to make about family abuse behind closed doors.

Mary's first thought on returning home is to attend the cemetery to clean her husband's gravestone, pitting the dead against the living. In her close-knit Northern community, what people think is her main concern; her husband's reputation.

Dixon and Daughters has more of the tense and horrific about it than some other abuse-based tales which have recently come to the stage. Bruce's script is frank, funny, and sad, but comes to a resolution a bit too quickly. Still, this play proves to be a strong piece which leaves us wondering what we really know about our friends and neighbours.

Dixon and Daughters at National Theatre, Dorfman until 10 June

Photo Credit: Helen Murray

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