AT FIRST you think that middle-aged Ella, Liz and Beth are old friends who used to have a bond through music. But their conversation over wine in Ella’s kitchen then suggests that they might be sisters who have grown apart. Yet their shared memories don’t mesh and again you question the nature of their relationship, the way they use the same phrases and their feelings towards Ella’s piano-tuner son working next door.
Helen Cooper’s play, first seen in Chichester last year, now arrives in London with Phoebe Nicholls joining the original cast as Beth, who gave up music (and a baby for adoption) for marriage to a millionaire. She has the means to fund the premiere of a concerto by single mum Ella (Jane Gurnett), and performed by Liz (Eleanor David), a renowned concert pianist. As they negotiate, bicker and reminisce, the only thing they seem to agree on is how their mother put them through endless hours of piano practice.
Ella idolises her late father, a viola player in a minor orchestra. Liz recalls him as an adulterer. The way that the reserved Beth is visibly uncomfortable as Ella rhapsodises about her childhood bird-watching trips with their dad is revealing. When you realise how Ella, Liz and Beth can form one name, Cooper’s governing conceit comes into focus. As Liz says: “There are so many ‘might-have-beens’ in everybody’s life.”
Such observations can strike a duff chord, as if Forrest Gump were going on about life being like a box of chocolates. It’s thanks to Samuel West’s sensitive production that we don’t mind too much nor that the subsequent revelations are predictable. And all credit to Cooper for some subtly drawn personalities.
Gurnett brings a brow-beaten but still passionate toughness to Ella, David is sensual and acerbic as Liz, who refuses to accept comforting lies, and Nicholls’s Beth has vulnerability and steel as she tries to blot out the past. They are such beautifully judged performances that you resent not catching every facial expression (so don’t get seats on the extreme right of the auditorium).
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Ashley Martin-Davis’s set has huge piano wires that almost ensnare the cast, with the first act of Ella’s kitchen, a shadowy piano in a translucent box above it, giving way in the second to a Steinway centre stage and debate about creativity and who owns art coming to the fore. This adds to the play’s cool, measured tone — one that intrigues but somehow never moves.