In an empathetic act of theatrical archivism, American playwright Joshua Harmon (known for Bad Jews) delves into the shifting, sinking relationship between his mother and grandmother. Tracing the family’s fractures back through Harmon’s life, We Had a World is a thoughtful if sedate staging of duty, care, and the relational ties that cannot be shaken loose.
A Tale of Two Matriarchs
Renee (played with sparkle by Suzanne Bertish) is a far better grandmother than she ever was a mother. Bertish shines in the freewheeling role, at turns elegant and generous, then petulant and sour. Anna Francolini takes on the more austere role as Josh’s mother, Ellen: sharp and stubborn, but never less than bursting with love for her son, played with sweet sincerity by Ryan Kopel. When Josh learns why his mother finds her own mother so difficult to love, his relationship with his grandmother is recontextualised, and he finds himself stuck in the middle of their war.
Acutely Drawn Characters
The women’s characters are acutely drawn, laying bare the behaviours that each finds maddening in the other. Kopel serves as a third-party facilitator, helping the audience understand the women’s fraught relationship and bringing them together to enact it. The pace stutters as their arguments begin to overpower the script, but elsewhere hope propels the story as the women take tentative steps towards each other, only to push even further away.
Behind the trio, an ice cube melts on a plinth in Sarah Beaton’s set. It is a remnant of Josh’s museum-going days with his curious, creative grandmother, as well as a nod to the climate crisis—a rather shoehorned strand of the story. The idea that nothing lasts forever is far more deftly achieved in the minute, fleeting interactions that Harmon and director Josh Seymour capture with the precision of a scientist pinning down a butterfly.
A Quiet Exercise in Understanding
Self-aware of its storytelling, We Had a World is pieced together by rummaging through fragments of memory and memorabilia, as if an attic’s worth of belongings has been shaken up and neatly arranged in a row. This is a quiet exercise in understanding one family, and it is no stretch for others to relate to this grappling with disappointment and mistakes, and the question of whether it is ever too late to make amends.
The play runs at Hampstead Theatre, London, until 4 July.
