Bitter Lemons. Photo (c) Alex BrennerBITTER LEMONS has already been a success elsewhere, which includes an award winning stint at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe where it garnered considerable interest and positive critical notices. With its exposed staging at Park Theatre’s smaller space, it is easy to understand why.
Seperately, Angelina (Shannon Hayes) and AJ (Chanel Waddock) find themselves trying to live their best lives by following their dreams and by inference, the dreams of a financially struggling mother and a football mad father. In Angelina’s case, her thoughts are occupied by the delivery of a business pitch where she is required to act as stooge to land clients of ethnic diversity — a cynical move, shrouded in corporate complicity and illustrative of the sort of superficial EDI engagement which has become ubiquitous in the past decade. Matters are further complicated when Angelina learns that she has recently become pregnant and that her partner (who is a work colleague) is about to be let go. In the other storyline AJ’s father encouraged her to play football from early childhood and made her complicit in secret training sessions living his dreams vicariously through her skills. When, after his death, she develops her own ambition to play for an elite women’s team, she almost immediately finds her circumstances compromised by an unwanted pregnancy, ultimately leading to the two women meeting at an abortion clinic.
The play is frank, even blunt in presenting the compromising issues which women face around pregnancy and the societal pressures to which they (and their bodies) are subject. Each performer convincingly navigates the worlds in which the play is set and through their efforts, it is difficult not to feel the weight of imbalance which exists between the male and female experience around career choices and having children.
