In a recent interview for the Guardian, writer Katie Redford described how the script for her new play was informed by her experience of workshops with teenagers. While the youngsters’ interests were wide-ranging – pop groups, gender issues, the climate crisis – their discussions, she said, always came back to “them and their mums”. This relationship is central to Wish You Weren’t Here, as it was to Redford’s previous two plays, for stage and for radio.
Single mother Lorna, 32, has brought daughter Mila, 16, to Scarborough to celebrate her GCSE results (even though Mila won’t disclose her grades). Lorna is unpleasantly surprised to discover that Mila has brought along Nan’s ashes, to scatter at the holiday site she loved. The situation is set for the airing of grievances, past and present: discussions and clashes about clothes, politics and society, social media, family, sex, with expectations occasionally reversed as the youthful mother exuberantly encourages her more serious daughter to enjoy herself. The ever-shifting mix of love and pain between characters limited and liberated by their inescapable bond is humorously and touchingly communicated by Eleanor Henderson (Lorna) and Olivia Pentelow (making a very creditable stage debut), under Rob Watt’s direction.
Ultimately, though, this hour-long two-hander is structured more like a soap opera than a stage drama (influenced, perhaps, by Redford’s other life, playing Lily Pargetter in Radio 4’s The Archers). Its storyline is presented as a series of short scenes that offer glimpses of conflicts or events and suggest possibilities of further development. Once aired, however, each issue is set aside to make way for the next, before it has been satisfactorily explored. The overall feel is illustrative rather than dramatic. Given that the piece is co-produced with youth-oriented Theatre Centre and is already touring schools, I can see it working well as a stimulus to conversations around the complexities of parent-teen relations – and not just for young people but for adults too.
Wish You Weren’t Here is at Playhouse, Sheffield, until 10 February, then tours until 15 March
