Despite an A-list cast of Bridgerton’s Golda Rosheuval and Letitia Wright of Black Panther fame, Not Your Superwoman feels like a wilfully scrappy note for Lynette Linton to end her exemplary reign at the Bush Theatre on – a fringey drama by a relatively obscure playwright (Emma Dennis-Edwards) that doesn’t at all feel like it’s being groomed for a West End transfer.
Linton has directed a lot of glossy slebby dramas at other theatres – she’s become a commercial director of some clout – but she’s kept the Bush’s rough-and-ready character intact throughout her reign. There’s definitely a charm to seeing the Bush not gussy up for its celebrity guests, but rather the superstar Wright tackle a no ego, down-to-earth role of a regular London girl. In it, she and Rosheuval play mother and daughter Joyce and Erica, with both of them sharing the flashback role of Elaine, Erica’s late grandmother.
It charts an eventful trip to Guyana, where Joyce was born and Elaine lived until murky circumstances drove her to move to England as a single mother. Now the pair have come to the South American-Caribbean country to scatter Elaine’s ashes.
But it’s also something of a personal reckoning for the two of them: Joyce has clearly been an incredibly difficult mother to have over the years: flakey, and with a tendency to throw money at Erica when love is what she would have preferred. Erica wants to talk about this. Joyce does not.
Both actors are superb. Rosheuval’s Joyce is a cool boho mum with an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary rap who seems like she’d be great at a party but has catastrophic blind spots as a nurturing parent. Wright’s Erica is the serious-minded young millennial who has done a lot of work on herself therapy wise but who clearly has a lot of stuff she wants to sort out with her maddeningly evasive parent.
Linton directs with both crispness of pacing and warmth of character, and the relatively stripped-back show is given a bit of visual oomph by Gino Ricardo Green’s video design - evocative of Guyana without being crushingly obvious about it, shimmeringly abstract fragments of rooms or landscapes rather than picture-postcard views.
But the script feels malnourished - the nonstop drip drip of revelation is a bit convenient, and it feels like Wright and Rosheuval are doing a lot of work to flesh out thinly sketched characters. I’m all for not over-explaining things but there are aspects of both women’s stories - Joyce’s in particular - that don’t quite add up and feel like a lot more connective tissue would be useful. Even Rosheuval’s clunky direct addresses to the audience feel like they only explain how Joyce feels now, and not why she acted as she did in the past.
Not Your Superwoman is not Lynton’s finest hour at the Bush, but despite the star casting it feels like her going out doing the thing she loved - telling interesting Black stories by interesting new writers. And for what it’s worth I ended up catching it several days after press night and it casually had one of the most diverse audiences I’ve ever seen in a London theatre – that feels like Lynton’s real legacy.
