Review: Wish You Weren’t Here at the Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse, Sheffield

These days it’s more likely the mums – teens are too busy worrying about the state of the world, railing against societal pressure, and navigating the minefield of social media to bother with revealing clothes and alcohol.

In Wish You Weren’t Here, a raw and real new show being performed at the Playhouse theatre in Sheffield, 30-something mum Lorna – her fun-seeking, happy-go-lucky, Primark-coated exterior masking a life of disappointment and resentment – remembers a time headstrong daughter, Mila, would happily hold her hand and make sandcastles with a yellow bucket on the beach.

Now the only physical touch between them is when Mila awkwardly rubs Lorna’s back as she pukes after one too many cocktails on their nostalgia-chasing holiday to Scarborough – and that same yellow bucket becomes the receptacle for the ashes of Mila’s beloved Nan, with whom Lorna had her own prickly relationship growing up.

The play, an affecting study of the intergenerational complexities of mother-daughter relationships, and tipped as one to watch in 2024, is written by Katie Redford. As an actor she plays aristocratic Lily Pargetter in Radio 4 soap The Archers, and as an award-winning playwright she is named on the BBC New Talent Hot List.

Katie penned the work after countless hours of conversations with hundreds of young people in schools around the country about what matters to them – which makes the play brilliantly authentic, totally real and, on occasion, slightly lacking in focus. By including and acknowledging all the myriad issues teenagers of today care about – climate change, single use plastics, disposable straws, racism, doxxing, sexting, their GCSE results, divorced parents, income, oat milk, Instagram, TikTok, selfies, body-image, self-esteem – it sometimes drifts away from the central theme of the play: the emotional gulf between mothers and daughters, the two people who ought to be closest in the world.

The acting – against a simple, sparse set of TV screens, a handful of props, and boxes that double as cliffs, hotel beds and a Wetherspoons bar – is a two-woman triumph, though. Eleanor Henderson is breezily brittle as mum Lorna, and impressive new talent Olivia Pentelow – making her professional stage debut – is heart-achingly vulnerable as 16-year-old Mila.

The pair are utterly believable as mother and daughter, and the snappy, convincing dialogue between them is both hilarious and heart-rending, sometimes within the same sentence.

The nauseous, gut-punch horror when Mila realises an intimate photo she sent to her boyfriend, on the ill-advised recommendation of her mum, has been shared among her peers is brilliantly acted by Pentelow. Henderson, meanwhile, is just the right level of excruciating in her efforts to recapture a connection with her little girl – who all the while is clutching the ashes of her own dead mum in a sandwich bag.

It’s funny, sad and moving, heartwarming and heartbreaking, and at just an hour without an interval it’s a ruefully short quick dip into a turbulent topic that could be expanded by Redford to take up at least six episodes of a full TV drama.

• Wish You Weren’t Here is at the Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse, Sheffield, until Saturday, February 10

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