We Had a World review – a playwright torn between his warring mother and grandmother

In an empathetic act of theatrical archivism, American playwright Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews) follows the shifting, sinking relationship between his mother and grandmother. Tracing the family’s fractures back through Harmon’s life, We Had a World is a thoughtful if sedate staging of duty, care and the relational ties that can’t be shaken loose.

Renee (Suzanne Bertish) is a far better grandmother than she ever was a mother. Bertish sparkles in the freewheeling role, in turns elegant and generous, then petulant and sour. Anna Francolini has the more austere role as Josh’s mother, Ellen: sharp and stubborn, but never less than bursting with love for her son (played with sweet sincerity by Ryan Kopel). When Josh learns why his mum finds her mum so difficult to love, his relationship with his grandmother is recontextualised, and he is stuck in the middle of their war.

Nothing lasts for ever … Suzanne Bertish and Ryan Kopel in We Had a World. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The women’s characters are acutely drawn, laying bare the behaviours that each finds maddening in the other. Kopel serves as a third-party facilitator, helping us to understand the women’s fraught relationship and bringing them together to enact it. The pace stutters as their arguments begin to overpower the script, but elsewhere hope propels the story as the women take tentative steps towards each other, only to push even further away.

Behind the trio, an ice cube melts on a plinth on Sarah Beaton’s set. It’s a remnant of Josh’s museum-going days with his curious, creative grandmother, as well as a nod to the climate crisis, a rather shoehorned strand of the story. The idea that nothing lasts for ever is far more deftly achieved in the minute, fleeting interactions that Harmon and director Josh Seymour capture with the precision of a scientist pinning down a butterfly.

Self-aware of its storytelling, We Had a World is pieced together by rummaging through fragments of memory and memorabilia, as if an attic’s worth of belongings has been shaken up and neatly arranged in a row. This is a quiet exercise in understanding one family and it’s no stretch for others to relate to this grappling with disappointment and mistakes, and the question of whether it’s ever too late to make amends.