Anastasia Hille and Erin Kellyman in Evening All Afternoon [Marc Brenner]

THE title of Anna Ziegler’s new play Evening All Afternoon is taken from Wallace Stevens’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, a poem about shifting perspectives and the way context alters meaning.

Jennifer (Anastasia Hille) is surprised to find love late in life. She marries John, only to discover she must also navigate Delilah (Erin Kellyman in an assured stage debut), his prickly, outspoken American daughter in her early 20s, still grieving her Jamaican-born mum.

Self-effacing Jennifer longs for them to get along, but they are poles apart. We learn that years of caring for her manipulative mother eventually pushed her to stand up for herself, revealing a steelier side.

Covertly reading Delilah’s emails, Jennifer discovers she is struggling with a predatory lecturer and later that she is at risk of failing her course.

Delilah eventually drops out of university and moves in with her stepmother just before the Covid lockdown. When she starts quietly appropriating Jennifer’s personal possessions, tensions inevitably come to a head.

Evening All Afternoon is a slow burn with a predictable conclusion, as the pair begin to discover what they have in common. Diyan Zora’s staging is deliberately understated on Basia Bińkowska’s pared-back revolving set. Yet the fizzing bare light bulb standing in for the ghost of Delilah’s late Jamaican-born mum and the shadow play both jar, at odds with the rest of the production.

Ziegler follows a well-trodden path, though this two-hander is well acted and its themes – grief, loss and the struggle for connection across generational and cultural divides – are affecting.

Until April 11
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