It’s a familiar parent-teenager encounter. One rants and swears through an unreliable account of the day’s activities; the other listens with measured concern while clearing up popped Pringles cartons and cans. But in this scenario, a chaotic father is stretching the patience of his daughter who has seen and heard it all before.
Sarah Power’s emotionally acute drama shows how such a role reversal is one impact of alcoholism on a family. Another is the way that 17-year-old Bo strives to ringfence her difficult home life with her dad, Grud, and keep it secret from her new friendship with Aicha at their sixth-form college.
Noemi Daboczi’s two-level set shows one room sliding into another: the family’s unkempt lounge is joined via a ramp to an orderly classroom. Bo is seen repeatedly bagging up the elements of both lives but she is ultimately unable to compartmentalise them: one bleeds into the other when Grud’s spilt beer runs down into the college room and, later, scenes from each begin to overlap. It is a compelling concept even if the moments of crossover between these two separate worlds – and the introduction of a third, escapist space – never disorientate as they might in this carefully paced production by Jaz Woodcock-Stewart, whose Paradise Now! showed a gift for the off-kilter.
Power’s play is measured in awkward hugs, hard silences and goofy jokes whose laughter often dissolves into sadness. Grud is a nickname from a childhood game and father and daughter continue to play out idiosyncratic routines that are as moving in their authenticity as Bo’s bants with Aicha. The girls warm to each other, despite initial wariness, bonding through the project of building a model satellite, which they begin to look after like a child, extending the play’s theme of care through the generations.
This friendship is as delicately drawn as Grud and Bo’s although both stories would benefit from a stronger arc and a more richly detailed social backdrop. But this three-hander succeeds as a character study, with uniformly strong performances. In her professional debut, Catherine Ashdown has a controlled gaze and contained body language to capture Bo’s isolation and bid for equilibrium while Karl Theobald balances whimsy, despair and flashes of intense violence as Grud. We could learn more about Aicha but Kadiesha Belgrave’s barnstorming comedy and charisma in the role bode well for the sitcom she is developing with BBC Studios.
At Hampstead theatre, London, until 3 August
