A particularly intense experience
We, the audience to Miranda Lapworth’s Storms, Maybe Snow, are the sea that long-married couple Jack (Neil Sellman) and Lou (Jenny Lloyd Lyons) look out onto from the big window of their beach house and balcony, writes Eleanor Thorn.
Tired and crotchety when they arrive at their home for a bigger break than usual, we learn that their world has been significantly shaken by a big diagnosis for Lou at the hospital. They’ve come for a breather and plan to stay to experience everyday life in the place they associate with good weather and relaxation. Supposedly to talk, too, though Lou is something of a clam when it comes to opening up. Her instinct to be stubbornly private about this health hurdle and about family relations is a habit very hard to break. As she begins to face up to her own difficulty with expressing the kinder emotions – particularly with regards to their daughter Mariana (it’s a two-way thing, both are prickly) – the seas become more choppy, the air more chilly and events in and outside the house certainly less calm.
Lou and Jack’s affectionate sparring into which they so easily slip – as avoidance of other important matters as much as anything – is their verbal relay game of connecting films and their actors. The rules of their game are in the programme, so the film buffs among us can go home and do likewise. As a charming touch, recipes of foodstuffs mentioned are shared for us to try on Lovely, Dark and Deep Productions’ website.
Spilling the beans on what significant changes occur would be spoiling the surprise but this play goes from being an apparently simple scenario to a more complex and uncomfortable web of mother-daughter-partner-spouse entanglement of resentment, grief, vulnerabilities (illness and loneliness), suppressed truths and more gentle affection and love. Mariana (Steph Sarratt) and partner Izzie (Sarah Cameron-West) come and go. Izzie, onlooker to it all, refers to mother and daughter as “virtuosos in the art of fury”. It’s a bumpy ride and in Lou’s case, even involves an uncharacteristic swim in stormy seas. Her saving of a drowning dog becomes the first step on the path to her own salvation and a route away from behavioural habits of a lifetime. Little by little, she and Mariana begin to create a chink in the armour that separates them, and so we see hope.
Health challenges and intense grief were no strangers to my theatre companion for the evening which meant this was a particularly intense experience, and at two and a half hours, on the drawn-out side. All four actors put in good performances. Steph Sarratt’s Mariana in particular was powerfully convincing. We’d have preferred less film relay for a trimmed down length, and the very uninventive scene changes seemed superfluous, but all in all we came away appreciative of the acting and the realism: whose family is devoid of underlying resentments in some shape or form?!
The Union Theatre, Old Union Arches, 229 Union St, London SE1 0LR from 30 September–2 October 2025. Book tickets at: uniontheatre.biz/storms-maybe-snow
The Drayton Arms Theatre | 4–8 November 2025
