Review: DIXON AND DAUGHTERS, National Theatre
Photo credit: Helen Murray
If you haven’t heard of Clean Break, this is exactly why we should be celebrating the company’s return to the National Theatre stage. Clean Break is an astonishing women’s theatre company that creates theatre to bring the hidden stories of women and criminalisation to a wider audience. Their work transforms the lives of women with lived experience of the criminal justice system, and the scope of their impact is encapsulated within Deborah Bruce’s new play Dixon and Daughters.
The play opens with sisters Bernie (Liz White) and Julie (Andrea Lowe) welcoming their mother Mary (Brid Brennan) home after a custodial sentence for a crime as yet unknown to the audience. Throughout the play, Bruce drip-feeds clues and intimations about the family’s past, colouring their apparently wry, snappy and typically Yorkshire banter as something much darker.
This play focuses on women, boasting an all-female cast and production team, but the undeniable centre of this play is the pervasive threat of male violence, the most terrifying character who has irrevocably changed the course of the lives of everyone we see on stage a man who has been dead and buried for three years.
Kat Heath’s set is a character in itself, a haunted house with ghostly semi-transparent walls that permits the audience selected glimpses into scenes unseen by other characters. Paule Constable’s lighting highlights the areas of the house fraught with past horrors.
The introduction of Leigh (Posy Sterling), an outsider to the family but close friend of Mary from her time in prison, demonstrates a different kind of familial bonding that happens between women in prison, apparently far more common amongst women than men, showing the resilience of women in the criminal justice system.
As the programme notes highlight, leaving an abusive situation is often a privilege, and Mary’s monologue describing her experience of being in a coercive, controlling relationship – delivered steadfastly and resolutely by Brennan - is a powerful reminder of this.
Bruce’s play packs a lot in – a quick glance over the content warnings will give you an idea of how much ground is covered in this play – but doesn’t feel like it ever gets bogged down. The fact is, the criminalisation of women cannot be extricated from the deep-rooted and far-reaching misogyny in society. Dixon and Daughters acknowledges this while maintaining a core of humanity and, astonishingly, fleeting moments of humour. Love and hate and forgiveness and resentment are beautifully and artfully tangled together in this script, which is handled delicately by the entire cast.
Dixon and Daughters is an important and frustratingly timely play. Harrowing, but full of love as much as it is full of fear, a rousing study in female resilience.
**** Four stars
Reviewed by: Livvy Perrett
Dixon and Daughters plays at the National Theatre until 10 June, with further information here.