REVIEW: HELEN by Maureen Lennon at Theatre503 until 27 May 2023

‘… brisk, intense, with a strong emotional hit’★★★★

Helen, a woman, reads the cast list information in Maureen Lennon’s script for Helen, her play, a description hinting at both the ordinariness and the unique qualities of a character whose adult life is portrayed over the 40-year span of her existence.

Helen (Jo Mousley) is also a mother – of Becca (Chloe Wade), the play’s only other living character – and a wife, though not for long, since the opening scene sees the early death of her husband, Becca’s father. The remaining 23 short, episodic scenes leap forward weeks, months and years through grief, ash-scattering, marriage, birth, separation, parting and the inevitable end. It’s brisk, intense and with a strong emotional hit as mother and daughter unite in their grief and try, sometimes together, sometimes at each other’s throats, to carry on their lives.

The play’s structure provides a tight, intense focus on the relationship between Helen and her daughter, and finds real, recognisable love and pain in their support for each other and their separations as Becca seeks her own way through her life (is there anything more painful for a teenager than a tipsy mother flirting with your teacher; the only thing worse than a parent who thinks your partner-to-be is not right for you is a parent who turns out to be absolutely right about that).

The tightness of the focus does sometimes make things a bit airless, though – we have no sense of lives lived outside the rooms, and occasional open air, where Helen’s and Becca’s short, charged conversations occur. No friends or other family members are apparent over four decades, no sense of what Helen and Becca do for a living or what they read or watch or choose to spend their time enjoying, although the simple clever set design goes some way to suggesting inner lives we don’t quite glimpse from the play.

While that may be entirely intentional to maintain the close emotional focus, it, allied with strictly linear progression across a long space of time, does make the play a little predictable in its mid-stretch (we intuit the second Helen disapproves of ‘Dave’ that Becca will marry him, have a child, and then split up with him, for example).

Helen’s is a life of quiet desperation, with the post-funeral wine bottle a harbinger of the alcoholism that will prove the biggest test of her relationship with Becca, but it’s also a life of laughters and joys, of pleasures and pains, the extraordinary of an individual life found in the ordinariness of existence.

Photography: Danny Kaan

HELEN by Maureen Lennon at Theatre503, 9 - 27 May 2023

Director: Tom Bellerby

Presented by Terrain

Box Office: https://theatre503.com/whats-on/helen/

Reviewer:

David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.