In Stef Smith’s new drama, two fortysomething air hostesses battle crushing existential angst, high in the skies. Jane is married with kids, Toni is a workaholic struggling to wean herself off a bad relationship; often their private lives feel as much an act of role playing as their jobs.
It’s Smith’s roiling prose that distinguishes ‘Enough’, and a sense that although the story feels fairly well-trodden, we never quite know where it’s going, as the women snap between contentedness and crisis and Bryony Shanahan’s production jerks and jumps between continents and timezones. The prose speaks of something moving, shifting, cracking in the earth far below them; certainly it’s an awakening, a willingness to challenge the places allotted to them but what one might implicitly see as patriarchal society; but there’s something – admittedly something underdeveloped – a bit more than that, hints of a profound crisis in the natural world around them, and a sense that their awakening might be tied to an abandoning of the skies.
Shanahan directs crisply, and there is a superficially simple but actually pretty nifty set from Kai Fischer that contains a surprise maybe not worth spoiling. There are solid turns from Louise Ludgate and Amanda Wright, who inject a real sense of humanity and genuine friendship into the often heavily stylized text.
Still, for me ‘Enough’ didn’t quite have enough going for it: for all the taut atmosphere and pulsating language, it somehow feels strangely pedestrian, unwilling to really push its more interesting ideas to the fore, packed with incident but ultimately lacking in momentum. It never quite takes off.
