Review: Evening All Afternoon
@ Donmar Warehouse until April 11th 2026
Director: Diyan Zora
Writer: Anna Ziegler
Cast: Anastasia Hille & Erin Kellyman
“It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing.
And it was going to snow.”
So goes the final stanza of Edward Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, the 1917 poem from which Evening All Afternoon takes its title. This idea of time as having in some way frozen - or at the very least constricted - when all there is to look forward to is more of the same, is intrinsic to Ziegler’s text, the latter half of which is set during lockdown, when life took on a sort of stale numbness. Prevalent too in both the poem and play are ideas of perspective, or “ways of looking”, with ideas of grief and motherhood explored through the lenses of two characters whose outlooks on life often clash.
Ziegler’s text centres Delilah, a younger half-American woman in mourning for her recently deceased birth mother, and Jennifer, Delilah’s new, older, stuffier British stepmother. The two women clash regularly, particularly when thrown together at the height of lockdown, with Zora staging them on a circle that rotates to symbolise how entwined in each others’ lives they have become. When not directly interacting with one another, the two characters soliloquise, reflecting on their experiences and feelings about each other and about both the global situation and their much more domestic and intimate preoccupations.
Hille and Kellyman are both excellent and they breathe authenticity into characters that are often drawn in the broadest of brushstrokes. Hille is a bundle of reserved British nerves and jitters, her anxious energy instantly recognisable and relatable, while Kellyman is a mass of quiet rage and frustration indicative of a woman struggling to understand her own place in the world. The two of them bounce off each other well, their clashes and conflicts fraught with a simultaneous desperation and reluctance to understand each other, and both of them are able to draw out the humour in a script that has a tendency towards inert melodrama.
The text itself, alas, is awash with inelegant attempts at profundity. Clichés are stacked upon clichés so that the stellar work Hille and Kellyman do to generate some emotional potency is constantly undermined. Conversations are laboured and ideas about death and loss start to feel trite as Ziegler stumbles in her quest for something resembling poetry. A few moments that are genuinely affecting are drowned out by moments that are contrived and hopelessly overwritten, and though it does tie some of its themes together quite successfully at the end, the journey is quite strained.
Score: ⭐⭐