Theatre Review - When It Happens to You
Amanda Abbington and Rosie Day in When It Happens to You [Mark Douet]
AMERICAN bestselling novelist Tawni O’Dell wrote When It Happens to You after her daughter was raped. It was an attempt to make sense of the sexual assault and how it affected their family. Tawni starred in the original production off-Broadway.
Tara (Amanda Abbington) is woken at 3am by a phone call every parent dreads. Her daughter Esme (Rosie Day), a chef in New York, is stricken. She tells her mom how a stranger had followed her home to her apartment and raped her.
Alongside her anguish Esme is incredulous that, despite her screams, no one in her block intervened or called the police. Her trauma inevitably impacts her mother, a divorcee, as well as Esme’s brother Connor (Miles Moran), who is just starting college.
Esme leaves her job and eventually her apartment, she starts drinking and rejects her mother’s offers of help and support. She seesaws between anger, shame and vulnerability, matched by Tara’s equally contradictory emotions.
It’s a devastating account of the damage violence wreaks on the victim and those closest to them.
Tok Stephen completes the quartet, playing several roles from shadowy stalker to sympathetic detective and a therapist who unexpectedly offers Tara the respite she needs.
Jez Bond’s sensitive production is played out on a bare stage. He wisely sacrifices a cumbersome set and props to foreground O’Dell’s words – scene changes are subtly underscored by Sherry Coenen’s lighting.
Skilfully acted, When It Happens to You is a slow burn (90 minutes without an interval), but there’s a powerful final twist and it’s impossible not to be profoundly moved as we watch mother and daughter’s attempts to reconnect and rebuild their lives.
Until August 31