Silence makes people feel uncomfortable, and exploiting protracted gaps in conversation to get people to speak up is a well-known technique. This is why Jess won't stop talking when she turns up at Sarah’s house.
If Jess doesn’t let her sister get a word in, Sarah can't ask for explanations or raise awkward questions, such as why has Jess appeared out of nowhere after a twelve-year estrangement with nothing but a rucksack full of booze and a goldfish named after a Spanish football player.
There’s a bit of reminiscing about childhood antics, clumsy, scattergun attempts to revive their previous relationship, but Jess is always at the centre of the story and continuously seeking validation from her older sibling that she’s not “mental”.
That Sarah doesn’t retaliate or even respond for the longest time is as much stunned silence as a difference in their personalities. Jess is motormouth and big gestures, whilst Sarah simmers under still waters.
Piece by piece, we see how they are differently but equally lonely and adrift. Jess walked out of the family home twelve years previously dragging her emotional baggage behind her; Sarah stayed in the Midlands town of their birth, unable to unpack the boxes that contain her past life in a new home.
Lisa Minichiello and Emma Riches give strong performances as the dysfunctional siblings, and director Julia Stubbs manages the pacing well in a play that is short on action and long on words, although how the women can consume so much alcohol and not display the usual signs of inebriation is a wonder.
Jess’s opening rant sets the tone for the remainder of Simon Longman’s 2015 quirky play, where the conversation—if you can call it that—is unnaturally dominated by a collection of near-monologues.
In amongst these is a planetary metaphor, its extension rendering it more opaque rather than illuminating, and a patience-testing tangential episode of magical realism. Sown onto the end of the narrative is a twist that serves to confirm what is already clear about these two women both as individuals and in their relationship.
Longman’s study of sibling dynamics touches many bases without drilling down to the source of their stagnation and ultimately appearing to leave its two protagonists where it found them, but with a hangover.