Anna Ziegler is one of those American playwrights who has had a million hits back home and remains virtually unproduced over here, (the sole exception being Photograph 51, which was a stonking West End hit about 10 years ago – less because it was an all time classic and more because it had Nicole Kidman in it.)
Evening all Afternoon isn’t necessarily one for the ages either. However, it’s pretty good, and more to the point the 90-minute two-hander is a tremendous vehicle for two actors. It enables an absolutely storming stage debut for Erin Kellyman, the 27-year-old Brit who has been making a name for herself as a screen actor since her teenage years and now ticks ‘being great on stage’ off with an effortlessness that recalls Jodie Comer’s belated theatre debut a couple of years back.
She plays Delilah, the surly university-age American daughter to an unseen British father. He’s taken her back home to England where she studies, sulks and slowly disintegrates, marinating in a dangerous psychological stew of grief at her mother’s death and the isolation of the Covid lockdown. And also resentment, of her dad’s new wife Jennifer (Anastasia Hille).
An absolutely storming stage debut for Erin Kellyman
The play is built on a fascinating variation on the old Brit/Yank culture clash. With her fabulous frizz of fair and perpetual scowl, Kellyman’s Delilah is a brassy, DGAF, New York-raised hipster who absolutely does not care about speaking her mind or causing offence. This puts her in contrast to Hille’s Jennifer, whose blonde hair is the only thing not mousy about her. Having sacrificed the middle of her life to serve as the carer-slash-doormat to her toxic mother (now deceased), she unexpectedly met Delilah’s dad and love blossomed, much to his daughter’s dismay.
Ziegler’s characters are kind of tropey. But over the course of 90 minutes she smartly deconstructs their facades. Tough-as-nails Delilah proves to be agonisingly vulnerable, slowly succumbing to something like a psychotic break – either that or she’s literally being visited by the ever-more vengeful ghost of her mother (Hamlet allusions abound). Jennifer, we discover, has some depths of her own, both in terms of a passive aggressive streak of defiance that she brings to bear on Delilah and some unexpectedly darker stuff besides.
Ultimately they’re both isolated women, coping badly with grief: much of the play is delivered as monologues and reportage, with live conversations only breaking out occasionally. The engine of the play is Delilah’s increasingly troubled state of mind, and Jennifer’s fumbling attempts to comfort her. Neither woman is suited to opening up emotionally.
Ziegler has a good ear for some distinct flavours of Englishness, both in terms of Jennifer’s crippling self-effacingness and her pass-agg undertones. It necessitates a self-effacing performance from Hille - it’s not the sort of role that begets stage fireworks - and the writing around the character is hackneyed in places (it is inevitable that Jennfier has some secrets in her past that will be divulged around 10 minutes before the end).
But Hille’s restrained performance allows Kellyman to let rip. The young actor is burningly charismatic – and probably would be in most roles – but it’s the combination of insouciant swagger and cataclysmic fragility that draws us to her. It’s not that she’s not as tough as she seems – she actually almost is. It’s that she remains cool as fuck while losing touch with reality, blind to her own decline, barely able to see the problem, let alone stop it.
An overly neat ending and a general nagging sense that this is a play written for Broadway – that is to say, a bit too sleek, a bit too streamlined – perhaps hold the writing back from greatness. But this is a play for actors first and foremost. Zora’s production leans into the intimacy of the Donmar, with a simple revolve set from Basia Binkowska revealing clever hidden depths, abetted by some magical lighting from Natasha Chivers.
The big story here though is Kellyman, who has made a name for herself on screen as a supporting actor but could easily be a stage lead of substance if she chooses to go that way.
