This is a beautiful presentation of an absolutely terrific play.
Written by Jennifer Lunn and first presented in the UK in 2023, it tells the story of the lesbian couple of the title.
Es and Flo met and fell in love during the anti-nuclear protests of the 1980’s, but now, like us all, they have aged. Es is beginning to have difficulty with her memory, and Flo is caught between acknowledging this and wanting to wish the problem away.
And then care worker Beata and her daughter turn up, paid for by Peter, Es’ never present son. A battle has begun, for control of Es, and her property.
Director Emma Canalese allows the pace to be truthfully gentle, and she elicits wonderful performances from her cast.
As Es, Annie Byron splendidly blends the exuberance of the woman at her peak with a growing bewilderment at her diminishment and a pathos-inducing fear of being a burden. Fay Du Chateau as Flo offers a superb portrait of indignation tempered by doubts and personal inadequacies. (Her stunned disbelief, her unwieldy tongue, her unreflecting mistakes are so much more truthfully human than the self-righteous grandstanding which too often struts our stages, a pontificating that is probably the unconscious projection of a need to be moral heroes in a world so loud and large that it threatens us with irrelevancy.)
In seeming contrast to our flailing protagonists, Charlotte Salusinszky as Beata, Polish immigrant and carer, offers a model of no-nonsense competency. But Lunn’s script is textured so that Beata does not reduce to some sort of magical migrant dispensing wisdom; she suffers challenges and makes errors, and Salusinszky marvellously captures both her practicality and her vulnerability. As her daughter Kasia, Erika Ndibe presents delightfully both the grace of innocence and its naïve moral certainty. If there was a moment that best encapsulates the piece’s extraordinary achievement, it’s when Kasia shares a plan she has for good with Es’ daughter-in-law, Catherine. Played brilliantly by Eloise Snape, Catherine is on the surface a silly, glibly narrow-minded woman, but realising the danger of little Kasia’s plan, she gently warns her it might be more complicated than she imagines.
Simplicity is resisted. Even forever offstage Peter is not simplified to mere villainy. His attitude to his mother and Flo may seem self-interested, but he is given reasons, ones that are – if not acceptable – certainly comprehensible.
The play is a moving representation of the challenges of aging, a stinging indictment of the erasure of lesbian experience, and a glorious hymn in praise of loyalty and love in their many, many forms.
But its brilliance is its honest acknowledgement of complexity. This is drama in the great tradition, a stage in which the human condition is honestly portrayed, where good and its opposite might be real, but are never found unmixed in any human soul. And to acknowledge complexity is to stand at the gateway to compassion.
Paul Gilchrist
Es and Flo by Jennifer Lunn
Presented by Mi Todo Productions
At the Old Fitz until 28 Feb
Image by Robert Catto
Theatre Red 