Es & Flo is a beautiful lesbian love story, but a very real one that includes the flaws in a decades-long relationship between birthday girl Esmee, who is seventy-one, and younger partner Flo, two women who fell in love when they met demonstrating against the bomb at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp over forty years ago, Es having fled there to escape her husband’s violence.
They have only just cut the birthday cake when Polish care worker Beata arrives with her daughter Kasia, engaged without consulting them by Es’s London based son Peter, who seldom visits them in Cardiff. Es has never revealed their relationship to him, and, living in the long shadow of Section 28, kept it quiet when she was a teacher.
Beata takes her duties very responsibly and tries to take control without realising Flo’s position, though it doesn’t take her long to recognise the situation. She becomes a supportive friend while Es finds great pleasure in the child’s company and Kasia bonds with Flo.
Es clearly has a problem remembering things, there are all the signs of developing dementia. Flo tries to talk about her giving her power of attorney without success and when Peter’s wife Catherine turns up on the same mission in his name and plans to put Es in a care home nearer London and to sell Es’s house (which would leave Flo homeless), things could have a tragic outcome.
Susie McKenna’s direction draws touchingly real performances from all her cast. As the central pair, Liz Crowther and Doreene Blackstock not only suggest years of intimacy and deep feeling but capture their guilts and frustrations, Es’s exasperation when she can’t remember what is where in the kitchen, the hurt Flo feels when her beloved seems to put her son first, but rapture in intimate contact too when away from other eyes, and their happiness increasingly threatened. This is a heartbreaking picture of the onset of dementia and the pain that it causes.
Adrianna Pavlovska presents a cooly efficient, professional Beata. She is an unmarried mother with her own secrets; her pious parents have never been told of the birth of mixed-race, illegitimate Kasia, though the child (a sprightly Chioma Nduka on press night) has been secretly saving up for a trip to visit them in Poland.
Daughter-in-law Catherine at first seems the villain of the piece (Peter is never seen) and Michelle McTernan at first seems to present a stereotypical and selfish middle-class woman, carrying out her husband’s instructions, but we see her change as she witnesses the evidence of real love and there is a subtle suggestion that she has has put up with Peter repeating his father’s behaviour.
Libby Watson’s set presents a long, open-plan kitchen and sitting room full of reminders of Es and Flo’s life together. As time moves on between scenes, there are video reminders of Greenham Common, a celebration of the strength of women together. These could do with brighter projection, they are not helped by a black background, but that aspect of the setting allows for a stark contrast when the location changes.
Though Es & Flo centres on a lesbian relationship, this moving portrait of lifelong lovers has deep echos for everyone, whether in the challenge of dementia, fear of what others think, abusive behaviour or the effect parents have on the children and it is not only moving but often touchingly funny. It needs to be seen by a much wider audience.