Not Your Superwoman, Bush Theatre review - powerful tribute to the plight and perseverance of Black women

The Bush is likely to continue its fine recent run of hit plays, with this funny, poignant, culturally authentic and beautifully acted two-hander, about an estranged mother and daughter struggling to heal old wounds. 

Bridgerton’s Golda Rosheuvel and Black Panther/Marvel alumnus Letitia Wright showcase their stage chops, as Joyce and Erica, who come together to honour their dead matriarch by taking her ashes back to her homeland in Guyana. The journey challenges them not only to repair their own relationship, but break a cycle of compromised parenthood. 

Writer Emma Dennis-Edwards presents a persuasive argument for this cycle, experienced by Black women who must shoulder the burden of raising their children, to be the rock, selfless and hardworking in adversity, the effort so enormous that sometimes warmth, even love can fall by the wayside. 

As serious as its themes, it’s an often extremely funny and buoyant piece, not least in its opening, as Joyce and Erica meet at a London airport for the flight to Guyana – Joyce’s first since she left there as a young child, and Erica’s first ever (Rosheuvel and Wright pictured below). It’s quickly apparent that the two are chalk and cheese: Joyce determinedly superficial, quick to drink, emotionally reticent; Erica earnest, open about her therapy and desire to deal with her issues, most of which involve a childhood in which she remembers her mother as largely absent. 

Erica is the one who has driven this mission to honour her beloved “Granny”, Elaine, apparently at the old woman’s dying request, Joyce sceptical of the enterprise. Each takes time from their awkward greeting to have a quiet moan about the other. “She’s not late because she’s Black,” growls Joyce, while Erica calculates how she’s going to survive “10 hours with my mum”, hoping that two Michael B Jordans in the movie Sinners (the actor plays twins) might just do it. 

Each in their way also demonstrates the generation gap, whether it’s Joyce’s confusion over rap, or Erica starting a sentence with, “I was watching a documentary – well, a Tic Toc.” Incompatibility continues once they’ve landed, Erica keen to talk through the detail of her itinerary and the many locations she’s heard about from her gran, Joyce asking “Any chance we could do something fun?”, obtaining a joint from the hotel barman and dragging her daughter to karaoke.

Amid the larks, Dennis-Edwards seeds the serious tension between the pair, which the mother/grandmother Elaine has come to symbolise. Just as Elaine had filled the void created by Joyce’s many absences in Erica’s childhood, it was Erica who was there during her gran’s final months, not Joyce, whose contribution to family life is to throw money at it. 

So, Erica is desperate to work through her grievances. “I’m trying to work out the shit I went through as a kid, but I end up going through your shit too,” she rages at her mum, not really understanding how important the second half of her sentence actually is.Dennis-Edwards starts to fill in the gaps, through flashbacks that involve both women with Elaine, at different stages in their lives. While the back and forth is a little overdone, it nevertheless involves some brilliant stagecraft, with both actresses playing the third woman in this family dynamic, sometimes opposite Joyce and sometimes Erica. Wright, who is Guyanese-British, is a particularly characterful and no-nonsense Elaine, as Rosheuvel conveys a younger Joyce far more vulnerable than the one we’ve been seeing.

This is how we learn of Joyce’s miscarriage, when Erica was very young, the recurring depression that explains much of her absence, and her own experience with a single mother whose stoicism created a painful distance. “No one is coming to save you baby girl, you have to save yourself.” All the while, in the present, Joyce is wrestling with dreams, intimating a long-buried memory of an incident in Guyana, which explains much of her late mother’s attitude after fleeing to London.

The Bush’s former artistic director Lynette Linton returns to direct the play, and with her skilled production team creates a vivid setting in which her actors can thrive. With the pair occupying an open box, bare other than for a couple of chairs, the interplay of sound, lighting and video design moves the two between time and place, London flats and Guyanese beaches and waterfalls (pictured above). The actors also help to evoke atmosphere: Wright’s enthusiastic description of Caribbean street food is positively mouth-watering. 

People bought together by bereavement is a fairly common theme, from Ian McEwan’s novel Last Orders (and film adaptation) to Jesse’s Eisenberg’s recent A Real Pain. Like Eisenberg, Dennis-Edwards brings a cultural specificity to her story that makes it incredibly fresh, and rich; but there’s a universal experience here too, referenced by an early statistic quoted by Joyce: married men live longer than single men, and single women live longer than married women. Erica beats herself up for not being the "superwoman" to her daughter that she wanted to be, but it’s a trap that men take advantage of all too happily. 

• Not Your Superwoman is at the Bush Theatre until 1 November
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk