Joshua Harmon’s gripping, revealing memory play is performed to perfection by its cast of three
Native New Yorker and playwright Joshua Harmon is probably best known for Bad Jews, his 2012 comedy that dishes the dirt on a highly competitive rivalry between cousins fighting over the legacy of their grandfather. Fraught Jewish family life is also evident in this autobiographical play, but the journey is very different. We Had a World boasts just three protagonists – each from a different generation of the same family. Harmon himself is played with total conviction by Ryan Kopel. Suzanne Bertish is extraordinary as grandmother Renee. She is at once formidable and vulnerable, self-centred and stony, yet capable of devotion and affection. Anna Francolini as Ellen, Renee’s daughter and Joshua’s mother, earns audience empathy as she struggles with being the outsider, sidelined by the bond between grandmother and grandson that has skipped – and even excluded – a generation.
Ellen and Renee don’t exactly see eye to eye, but it’s obvious from the get-go that grandmother and grandson are devoted to each other. The first words we hear are Renee’s, as she emerges in a nightdress on the bare stage from one side and Joshua from the other in his underwear. She's on the phone to him as she announces: "Joshua, it’s your grandmother. I’ve got your next play here in my apartment. It’s called Battle of the Titans and it’s about your mother and your aunt."
"I've always wanted to write about our family," Joshua admits. "I didn’t know if I had your permission." Renee responds with a resounding "absolutely! Make it as bitter and vitriolic as possible".
Playing both guide and narrator, Joshua must reveal that nonagenarian Renee (whom he dubs Nana) has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She is now dying, though she seems remarkably composed, neither afraid nor apprehensive. Deciding to share something uplifting for balance, he takes us back to a time when he was five years old, taking part in a two-week course at New York’s Museum of Art that Nana signed them both up for. If that sounds a little grown-up for a child, Joshua also muses that when he was 10 Renee took him to see a rather risqué art show featuring a most memorable exhibit of "a bar of soap with a piece of pubic hair on it".
Skip forward to age 15 and Joshua realises that Nana is not only a chronic alcoholic, but that his mother Ellen suffered as a child from rather more than neglect. Her other daughter Susan "jumped ship" and left Ellen to become both carer and parent to her mother – a full-time job she deplored. She would never forgive sister Susan – nor indeed her mother Renee.
Throughout the 85 minutes, the family’s Judaism – a particularly New York urban involvement – remains a constant for Joshua and Renee. The play opens at Passover with a typical family discussion about who will host the first night Seder. We never meet the other menfolk of the family – in a way perhaps typical of Jewish males of the time, they don’t get involved with domestic issues or work. This, too, alienated Ellen.
The audience is afforded an intimacy in this story thanks to Hampstead Theatre's studio, in which viewers are seated around three sides of the stage. This unique connection is aided further by designer Sarah Beaton’s set – which is almost bare, with just a couple of chairs and, intriguingly, a block of ice that gradually melts away – and the remarkable work by director Josh Seymour and his cast.
The contradictions in We Had a World are a reminder that family ties can be cruel, yet forgiving, fuelled by resentment that often makes bedfellows with affection. Harmon has delivered a lesson in memory playwriting that is intriguing, magical and deeply personal.
By Judi Herman
Photos by Marc Brenner
We Had A World runs until Saturday 4 July. 7.45pm. £28, £10 concs. Hampstead Theatre, London, NW3 3EU. hampsteadtheatre.com