Krista (Bettina Paris) and Pip (Tina Rizzo) are a pair of Maltese sisters, separated by geography but linked by family, and all the good and bad that entails. While Pip still lives in Malta, hovering on the edge of marriage and looking after their ailing father, Krista is working bar jobs while auditioning as an aspiring actor in London. Neither of them is truly happy, and constantly at the back of their minds is their alcoholic father’s slow but unstoppable decline.
It’s a scattered piece, forming a mosaic of a story, told in fractured snippets across irregular periods of time. At first, the pair communicate solely over phone calls and FaceTime chats, the pair of actors staying on opposite sides of the stage, only meeting physically around the halfway point when Krista travels home to help prepare for her sister’s upcoming wedding.
It’s a deeply personal story, and one in which Bettina Paris’s script creates a vivid portrayal of two very different people trying to fit and bond together. In many ways, the story is about the inconsistent interaction of the two women as much as their shared toil. It’s also a clearly emotive expression of the anxiety and guilt, as well as the frustrations, that come with having an ageing parent, one who suffers from alcoholism, and an ever spiralling pattern of decline.
It’s a play with a real sense of reality in the dialogue and the chemistry between Paris and Rizzo. The sororal bonds feel real, despite the actors having no great physical similarity, and yet there’s a thinness to the characters beneath the dialogue. Despite them feeling real, we never discover much about them or their lives beyond a few small facets, nor of the father, beyond his illness and a brief mention of his work.
The play bears its heart, while keeping everyone steadfastly at arms length, a problem exacerbated somewhat in the back half, as events and emotions whizz by in short scenes which don’t end or resolve so much as just stop and skip to the next, setting its aim very high, and never quite managing to achieve its goal. Ultimately quite entertaining, but emotionally unsatisfying by the end.